David Foster Wallace - Infinite Jest (1996)

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What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human [...] is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.

David Foster Wallace
She wanted only tall smooth bottles whose labels spoke of Proof.

David Foster Wallace
We're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we've never even met?

David Foster Wallace
These worst mornings with cold floors and hot windows and merciless light—the soul's certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer.

David Foster Wallace
This appetite to choose death by pleasure if it is available to choose - this appetite of your people unable to choose appetites, this is the death.

David Foster Wallace
That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.

David Foster Wallace
Who would die for this chance to be fed this death of pleasure with spoons, in their warm homes, alone, unmoving?

David Foster Wallace
Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.

David Foster Wallace
Genuine pathological openness is about as seductive as Tourette's Syndrome.

David Foster Wallace
I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.

David Foster Wallace
No single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.

David Foster Wallace
Betraying her class and origin with the heartbreaking openness Joelle's always viewed as either terribly stupid or terribly brave

David Foster Wallace
Does somebody have an explanation why there's human flesh on the hall window upstairs?

David Foster Wallace
It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again.

David Foster Wallace
Our attachments are our temple, what we worship, no? What we give ourselves to, what we invest with faith.... Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care.

David Foster Wallace
They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier.
Te Occidere Possunt Sed Te Edere Non Possunt Nefas Est

David Foster Wallace
I am concentrating docilely on the question why U.S. restrooms always appear to us as infirmaries for public distress, the place to reagain control.

David Foster Wallace
Everything gets horrible. Everything you see gets ugly. Lurid is the word. Doctor Garton said lurid, one time. That's the right word for it. And everything sounds harsh, spiny and harsh sounding, like every sound you hear all of a sudden has teeth. And smelling like I smell bad even after I just got out of the shower. It's like what's the point of washing if everything smells like I need another shower

David Foster Wallace
He said she went around with her feelings out in front of her with an arm around the feelings' windpipe and a Glock 9mm. to the feelings' temple like a terrorist with a hostage, daring you to shoot.

David Foster Wallace
I'd tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear

David Foster Wallace
Sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them.

David Foster Wallace
That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack. That concentrating on anything is very hard work.

David Foster Wallace
'So then at forty-six years of age I came here to learn to live by cliches,' is what Day says to Charlotte Treat right after Randy Lenz asked what time it was, again, at 0825. 'To turn my will and life over to the care of cliches. One day at a time. Easy does it. First things first. Courage is fear that has said its prayers. Ask for help. Thy will not mine be done. It works if you work it. Grow or go. Keep coming back.' [...] I walk around with my arms out straight in front of me and recite these cliches. In a monotone. No inflection necessary. Could that be one? Could that be added to the cliche-pool? "No inflection necessary"? Too many syllables, probably.'

David Foster Wallace
You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice.

David Foster Wallace
My bones are ringing the way sometimes people say their ears are ringing, I'm so tired.

David Foster Wallace
He didn't reject the idea so much as not react to it and watch as it floated away. He thought very broadly of desires and ideas being watched but not acted upon, he thought of impulses being starved of expression and dying out and floating dryly away.

David Foster Wallace
Hal Incandenza has an almost obsessive dislike for deLint, whom he tells Mario he sometimes cannot quite believe is even real, and tries to get to the side of, to see whether deLint has a true z coordinate or is just a cutout or projection.

David Foster Wallace
What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love? What if the temple comes to Mohammed? What if you just love? without deciding? You just do: you see her and in that instant are lost to sober account-keeping and cannot choose but to love?

David Foster Wallace
The individual's right to pursue his own vision of the best ration of pleasure to pain: utterly sacrosanct.

David Foster Wallace
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.

David Foster Wallace