Quotes from David Foster Wallace

1962 that "No data processing system, whether artificial or living, can process more than 2 × 1047 bits per second per gram of its mass," which means that a hypothetical supercomputer the size of the earth (= c. 6 × 1027 grams) grinding away for as long as the earth has existed (= about 1010 years, with c. 3.14 × 107 seconds/year) can have processed at most 2.56 × 2092 bits, which number is known as Bremermann's Limit.

They thunder eastward across pedalferrous terrain that today is fallow, denuded. To the east, dimmed by the fulvous cloud the hamsters send up, is the vivid verdant ragged outline of the annularly overfertilized forests of what used to be central Maine. All these territories

Gately's never had sex sober yet, or danced, or held somebody's hand except to say the Our Father in a big circle.

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. The ones who give nothing away.

If you spend enough time reading or writing, you find a voice, but you also find certain tastes. You find certain writers who when they write, it makes your own brain voice like a tuning fork, and you just resonate with them. And when that happens, reading those writers … becomes a source of unbelievable joy. It's like eating candy for the soul. And I sometimes have a hard time understanding how people who don't have that in their lives make it through the day.

The emotionally Hobbesian meat market of the dating scene.

but rather much more likely to do with the fact that his widow-to-be was engaging in sexual enmeshments with just about everything with a T-chromosome, and had been for what sounded like many years, including possibly with the Auteur's son and Madame's craven love, as a child, seeing as it sounded like the little rotter had enough malcathected issues with his mother to keep all of Vienna humming briskly for quite some time.

How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it's just words.

what words and terms might be applied to describe and assess such a solipsistic, self-consumed, endless emotional vacuum and sponge as she now appeared to herself to be? How was she to decide and describe—even to herself, looking inward and facing herself—what all she'd so painfully learned said about her?

But they're shit.' 'And yet at the same time they're art. Exquisite pieces of art. They're literally incredible.' 'No, they're literally shit is literally what they are.

and that the Academy has presently in residence no fewer than a third of the continent's top thirty juniors, in age brackets all across the board, and that I here, who go by 'Hal,' usually, am 'right up there among the very

Quando vennero presentati, lui fece una battuta, sperando di piacere. Lei rise a crepapelle, sperando di piacere. Poi se ne tornarono a casa in macchina, ognuno per conto suo, lo sguardo fisso davanti a sé, la stessa identica smorfia sul viso. A quello che li aveva presentati nessuno dei due piaceva troppo, anche se faceva finta di sí, visto che ci teneva tanto a mantenere sempre buoni rapporti con tutti. Sai, non si sa mai, in fondo, o invece sì, o invece sì.

We may say, roughly, that a mathematical idea is 'significant' if it can be connected, in a natural and illuminating way, with a large complex of other mathematical ideas. Thus a serious mathematical theorem, a theorem which connects significant ideas, is likely to lead to important advances in mathematics itself and even in other sciences.

This is what I get for passing down priceless fruits of hard experience to somebody who still thinks it's exciting to shave.

Here is how to take nonnarcotic muscle relaxants for the back spasms that come from thousands of serves to no one. Here is how to weep in bed trying to remember when your torn blue ankle didn't hurt every minute. This is the whirlpool, a friend.

Orin, Mario, and Hal's late father was revered as a genius in his original profession without anybody ever realizing what he really turned out to be a genius at, even he himself, at least not while he was alive, which is perhaps bona-fidely tragic but also, as far as Mario's concerned, ultimately all right, if that's the way things unfolded.

Hefenreffers awakened Gately and his new droogs to the usually-dormant-but-apparently-ever-lurking ill will of innocent-seeming public sidewalks everywhere.

Naturally, the significant results that legitimize a mathematical theory take time to derive, and then even more time to be fully accepted, and of course throughout this time the Insanity-v.-Genius question remains undecided, probably even for the mathematician himself, so that he's developing his theory and cooking his proofs under conditions of enormous personal stress and doubt, and sometimes isn't even vindicated in his own lifetime, etc.

It is at once too noisy and too quiet to do any real work, and I have no ideas that do not seem to me shallow and overwrought.

of course, great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common. Both depend on what communications theorists sometimes call exformation, which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient.

It occurs to me that neither my aunt nor my uncle has once asked what happened to the pretty little thing that came visiting with us last time we were up, and I wonder what my mother has said to my aunt. I begin to be anxious about something I can neither locate nor define.

All this is just sort of warming up; the whole thing won't be like this.

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. The ones who give nothing away.' 'But then how do you know they're monsters, then?' 'That's the monstrosity right there, Boo. I'm starting to think.' 'Golly Ned.' 'That they walk among us. Teach our children. Inscrutable. Brass-faced.

No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.