Quotes from David Foster Wallace

The word around good old Table 64 last night was that in primitive and incredibly poor Cozumel the U.S. dollar is treated like a UFO: "They worship it when it lands.

TE OCCIDERE POSSUNT SED TE EDERE NON POSSUNT NEFAS EST

Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.

One or two factoids. Plato, né Aristocles, is c. 427–347 BCE; Aristotle is 384–322 BCE (compare Socrates at c. 470–399 and Zeno at c. 490–435). Aristotle was a former star pupil in Plato's Academy, the motto over the front door of which happened to be LET NO ONE WHO IS IGNORANT OF GEOMETRY ENTER HERE. 18

If we're the only animals who know in advance we're going to die, we're also probably the only animals who would submit so cheerfully to the sustained denial of this undeniable and very important truth.

There are exactly as many R.L.-points in [0,1] as there are in [0,2].

It is unimaginably hard to do this—to live consciously, adultly, day in and day out.

The best teachers seem to acknowledge the conflict between their vocations, reach some kind of internal compromise, and go on.

Sampras, por otro lado, parece flotar como si fuera caspa por toda la pista. Philippoussis es como un ejército de tierra grande y terrible; Sampras es más naval, más de la escuela de acercarse con sigilo y rodear al rival. Philippoussis es oligárquico: él tiene su voluntad y busca imponerla. Sampras es más democrático, es decir, más caótico y también más humano.

you can prove that there are exactly as many real numbers between 0 and 1 as between 0 and any other finite number you can think of.

As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome

Tienen expresiones más glaciales; los encuentros de miradas parecen peligrosos de la forma en que pueden ser peligrosos los encuentros de miradas en el metro. Las mujeres suelen llevar atuendos que te sugieren lo que puedes ver de ellas cuando no llevan atuendos

why evil is so powerful is that it's hideously vital and robust and usually impossible to look away from.

Learning how to think' really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.

a paciencia de los neoyorquinos para las multitudes, las colas y las esperas, resulta muy impresionante si no estás acostumbrada a ella; son capaces de permanecer todos inactivos en lugares sin aire durante periodos extensos, con unas expresiones en los ojos que indican esa combinación neoyorquina única de meditación y depresión clínica, claramente infelices, pero sin quejarse para nada.

Kafka, of course, would be in a unique position to appreciate the irony of submitting his short stories to this kind of high-efficiency critical machine, the literary equivalent of tearing the petals off and grinding them up and running the goo through a spectrometer to explain why a rose smells so pretty.

The stand he wants to open'll sell gyros, he says. He's not Italian after all.

There is also a very quiet but very sturdy and constant tragic undercurrent that concerns a people who are completely lost, who are lost within their families and lost within their nation, and lost within their time, and who only want some sort of direction or purpose or sense of community or love.

Then, if you have good luck and people seem to like what you do, and you actually get to get paid for it, and get to see your stuff professionally typeset and bound and blurbed and reviewed and even (once) being read on the AM subway by a pretty girl you don't even know, it seems to make it even more fun. For a while.

Julie ha detto a Faye che lei è convinta che due persone innamorate attraversano tre fasi distinte prima di arrivare a conoscersi davvero. All'inizio si raccontano aneddoti e gusti personali. Poi ciascuno dei due dice all'altro in che cosa crede. E poi ciascuno osserva la relazione che c'è fra quello in cui l'altro ha detto di credere e quello che in effetti fa .

OK true, Funhouse 1, like all the foreseen and planned national chain of Funhouse franchises, is, in reality, just a discotheque. A watering hole and meat market and gathering place where the spotlights tell us where and how to swing to the beat. One big enclosed anarchic revel—a Party: where we, via Party rule, gather and pretend with grim Puritan fortitude that we're having just way more fun than anybody could really be having.

Lo de «aprender a pensar» en realidad quiere decir ejercer cierto control sobre cómo y qué piensa uno.

Statisticians report that television is watched over six hours a day in the average American household. I don't know any fiction writers who live in average American households. I suspect Louise Erdrich might. Actually I have never seen an average American household. Except on TV.

Tax Law is like the world's biggest chess game with all sorts of weird conundrums about ethics and civics and consent of the governed built in. For me, it's a bit like math. I have no talent for it but find it still erotically interesting.