Quotes from David Foster Wallace

Lo fundamental de la escoba, las cerdas o el mango, depende de si se quiere barrer o romper ventanas

Each man, passing through his department's hall, felt the special subsonic disquiet the overtime executive in topcoat and unfresh suit and loosened tie feels as he moves in nighttime through areas meant to be experienced in, and as, daytime.

Todo el tiempo que estuvimos separados yo estuve pensando en ella, pero un día me dijo: 'Mis sentimientos han cambiado, qué puedo hacer, ya no aguanto a Bruce'. Como si fueran sus sentimientos los que la controlaran a ella y no al revés. Como si sus sentimientos estuvieran fuera de ella y no bajo su control, como un autobús que uno tiene que esperar.

There is also the fact that premodern lobster was cooked dead and then preserved, usually packed in salt or crude hermetic containers.

a very modern and American type of ambivalence, a sort of interior war between your deep need to believe and your deep belief that the need to believe is bullshit, that there's nothing left anywhere but sales and salesmen.

wants to have it both ways, rather like big corporations that give to charity and then try to reap PR benefits by hyping their altruism in their ads.

Your average deformity sufferer has a love-hate thing with mirrors: you need to see how things are progressing, but you also hate it that they're progressing.

Realism: if Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it.

life is quicker, denser, more interesting, more… well, lively

Our attachments are our temple, what we worship, no? What we give ourselves to, what we invest with faith." Steeply made motions of weary familiarity. "Herrrrrre we go." Marathe ignored this. "Are we not all of us fanatics? I say only what you of the USA only pretend you do not know. Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care.

Nechtr looks at him, but that's almost even creepier: this Mark guy looks at you with the kind of distanced concentration you use to look at something you're eating.

Mario loves Hal so much it makes his heart beat hard.

T2 is thus also the first and best instance of a paradoxical law that appears to hold true for the entire F/X Porn genre. It is called the Inverse Cost and Quality Law, and it states very simply that the larger a movie's budget is, the shittier that movie is going to be. - from The (As It Were) Seminal Importance of Terminator 2

Culture-wise, shall I spend much of your time pointing out the degree to which televisual values influence the contemporary mood of jaded weltschmerz, self-mocking materialism, blank indifference, and the delusion that cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive?

I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction's job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big part of serious fiction's purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves.

he cannot close his eyes without being subjected to the diplopic double image of his lover's steady, supplicating and aging (!?) eyes, and then his own eyes vertical above her, darting from side to side, more concerned with how he is seen than with what he sees.

Sono le onde a far sì che il mare non sia solo un enorme pozzanghera.

Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is

prepubescent relative to collect your excellence-in-filmed-sodomy prize?—are met with bemused shrugs), "but I'm here to thank you on his behalf, and to say that I taught Jim everything he knows." [Enormous audience laugh and ovation, single spasmodic shudder from hunched ABC Radio lady.]

This was, keep in mind, the tail end of the era of the mainframe computers, tape- and card-based data storage, & c., which now seems almost Flinstonianly remote.

But the point was that I realized, on some level, that whatever a potentially 'lost soul' was, I was one -- and it wasn't cool or funny.

In risposta alla prospettiva di una gratificazione e un accudimento straordinari, la mia insaziabile parte infantile non farà che accrescere la soglia di soddisfazione fino a conseguire di nuovo la sua omeostasi di grave insoddisfazione.

Civilwarland in Bad Decline

At a certain point, we're either gonna have to put away childish things and discipline ourself about how much time do I spend being passively entertained? And how much time do I spend doing stuff that actually isn't all that much fun minute by minute, but that builds certain muscles in me as a grown-up and a human being?