David Foster Wallace - Infinite Jest (1996)

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Molly Notkin often confides on the phone to Joelle van Dyne about the one tormented love of Nokin's life thus far, an erotically circumscribed G.W. Pabst scholar at New York University tortured by the neurotic compulsion that there are only a finite number of erections possible in the world at any one time and that his tumescence means e.g. the detumescence of some perhaps more deserving or tortured Third World sorghum farmer

David Foster Wallace
Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?" "I give." "You get someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog.

David Foster Wallace
The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.

David Foster Wallace
Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere Mary went, the lights became erratic.

David Foster Wallace
Why not? Why not? Why not not, then, if the best reasoning you can contrive is why not?

David Foster Wallace
Please learn the pragmatics of expressing fear: sometimes words that seem to express really invoke. This can be tricky.

David Foster Wallace
Almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it.

David Foster Wallace
It takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak.

David Foster Wallace
Some persons can give themselves away to an ambitious pursuit and have that be all the giving-themselves-away-to-something they need to do. Though sometimes this changes as the players get older and the pursuit more stress-fraught. American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.

David Foster Wallace
'You know what your problem is, Hallie?' 'I have just one problem?'

David Foster Wallace
Then Thursday Coyle had his left wrist tied to his right ankle and was still beating this new kid Stockhausen until Schtitt sent Tex Watson down to tell him to knock it off.

David Foster Wallace
He knew what the Beats know and what the great tennis player knows, son: learn to do nothing, with your whole head and body, and everything will be done by what's around you.

David Foster Wallace
It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.

David Foster Wallace
I want to tell you,' the voice on the phone said. 'My head is filled with things to say.'... 'I don't mind,' Hal said softly. 'I could wait forever.' 'That's what you think,' the voice said. The connection was cut.

David Foster Wallace
I like the fans' sound at night. Do you? It's like somebody big far away goes like: it'sOKit'sOKit'sOKit'sOK, over and over. From very far away.

David Foster Wallace
There are no choices without personal freedom, Buckeroo. It's not us who are dead inside. These things you find so weak and contemptible in us - these are just the hazards of being free

David Foster Wallace
Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever.

David Foster Wallace
You can be shaped, or you can be broken. There is not much in between. Try to learn. Be coachable. Try to learn from everybody, especially those who fail. This is hard.... How promising you are as a Student of the Game is a function of what you can pay attention to without running away.

David Foster Wallace
That everyone is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else. That this isn't necessarily perverse.

David Foster Wallace
The sun would leave my sky if I couldn't assume you'd simply come and tell me you were sad.

David Foster Wallace
Certain sincerely devout and spiritually advanced people believe that the God of their understanding helps them find parking places and gives them advice on Mass. Lottery numbers.

David Foster Wallace
Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he's devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It's hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.

David Foster Wallace
After a few weeks of this she'd spend a whole day weeping, beating at herself as if on fire.

David Foster Wallace
They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier.

David Foster Wallace
You burn with hunger for food that does not exist.

David Foster Wallace
Severity is in the eye of the sufferer, it says. Pain is pain.

David Foster Wallace