Quotes from David Foster Wallace

The thing that I think a lot of us forget is that part of the fault is the books . . . you get this sort of cycle that as they become less important commercially they begin protecting their egos by talking more and more to each other and establishing themselves as this kind of tight cloistered world that doesn't really have anything to do with regular readers.

Hence also the weird viewer complicity behind TV's sham "breakthrough programs": Joe Briefcase needs that PR-patina of "freshness" and "outrageousness" to quiet his conscience while he goes about getting from television what we've all been trained to want from it: some strangely American, profoundly shallow, and eternally temporary reassurance.

Boo, I think I no longer believe in monsters as faces in the floor or feral infants or vampires or whatever. I think at seventeen now I believe the only real monsters might be the type of liar where there's simply no way to tell.

Manhãs de escala são um momento especial para o semiagorafóbico, porque quase todo mundo deixa o navio e vai para a terra firme participar de Passeios Organizados ou fazer turismo peripatético espontâneo e os conveses superiores da e.m. Nadir assumem a mesma qualidade fantasmagórica e misteriosa da sua casa quando você é criança, adoece e fica em casa quando todo mundo saiu para o trabalho ou a escola etc.

Mathematical thinking is abstract, but it's also thoroughly private-sector and results-oriented.

Americans seemed no longer united so much by common beliefs as by common images: what binds us became what we stand witness to. Nobody sees this as a good change.

La vita è come il tennis vince chi serve meglio

The big thing (that really good fiction) can do is leaping over that wall of self and portraying inner experience and setting up a kind of intimate conversation between two consciousnesses . . . the trick is going to be trying to find a way to do it--and for a generation--whose relation to the long sustained, linear verbal communication is fundamentally different.

And just before 0145h. on 2 April Y.D.A.U., his wife arrived back home

Marathe shifted in his chair. 'In a case such as this you become the slave who believes he is free.

Nel momento in cui riconosceva quello che c'era su una cartuccia provava la sensazione carica d'ansia che ci fosse qualcosa di meglio su un'altra cartuccia e che potenzialmente se lo stava perdendo. Poi si rese conto che avrebbe avuto tutto il tempo di godersi ogni cartuccia e capì intellettualmente che non aveva senso provare il panico di perdersi qualcosa.

For one, the college itself turned out to have a lot of moral hypocrisy about it, e.g., congratulating itself on its diversity and the leftist piety of its politics while in reality going about the business of preparing elite kids to enter elite professions and make a great deal of money, thus increasing the pool of prosperous alumni donors. Without anyone ever discussing it or even allowing themselves to be aware of it, the college was a veritable temple of Mammon.

The nameless anxiety of the dream is indescribably horrid - the wide, Jeni, feels she simply must (wiper) must (wiper) must catch the husband's car in order to avert some kind of crisis so horrible it has no name.

The big thing that makes Dostoevsky invaluable for American readers and writers is that he appears to possess degrees of passion, conviction, and engagement with deep moral issues that we-here, today-cannot or do not permit ourselves.

Then in such a case your temple is self and sentiment. Then in such an instance you are a fanatic of desire, a slave to your individual subjective narrow self's sentiments; a citizen of nothing. You become a citizen of nothing. You are by yourself and alone, kneeling to yourself.

The other nice thing about the Pump Room is the way it's connected by tunnel to the prorectors' rows of housing units, which means men's rooms, which means Hal can crawl, hunch, and tiptoe into

Chandler Foss is flossing his teeth

And his dreams late that night, after the Braintree-Bob Death Commitment, seem to set him under a sort of sea, at terrific depths, the water all around him silent and dim and the same temperature he is.

Of course it's true that an unprecedented number of young Americans have big disposable incomes, fine tastes, nice things, competent accountants, access to exotic intoxicants, attractive sex partners, and are still deeply unhappy.

In one scene she says fuck.

Otro legado de infancia: cuando a su cuerpo le sucedía algo doloroso o desagradable, Skip Atwater a menudo tenía la extraña impresión de que él no era de hecho un cuerpo que ocupaba espacio sino más bien una zona de espacio en sí en forma de cuerpo, impenetrable pero vacío, dotado de esa sensación vacua y estruendosa que asociamos con el espacio vacío.

The closest conventional analogue I could derive for this figure was a cycloid, L'Hôpital's solution to Bernoulli's famous Brachistochrone Problem, the curve traced by a fixed point on the circumference of a circle rolling along a continuous plane.

Uniform Convergence & Associated Aracana item (d) for exceptional points, which again please recall can also be called 'discontinuities'. (N.B.: Some math classes also use singularity to mean exceptional point, which is both confusing and intriguing since the term also refers to Black Holes, which in a sense is what discontinuities are.)

Golf. A golf man. Is my tone communicating the contempt? Billiards on a big table, Jim. A bodiless game of spasmodic flailing and flying sod. A quote unquote sport. Anal rage and checkered berets.