Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

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.

A U.S. of modern A. where the State is not a team or a code, but a sort of sloppy intersection of desires and fears, where the only public consensus a boy must surrender to is the acknowledged primacy of straight-line pursuing this flat and short-sighted idea of personal happiness:

You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place. 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.

Focus, self-consciousness, the chattering head, the cackling voices, the choking-issue, fear versus whatever isn’t fear, self-image, doubts, reluctances, little tight-lipped cold-footed men inside your mind, cackling about fear and doubt, chinks in the mental armor.

talent is sort of a dark gift, that talent is its own expectation: it is there from the start and either lived up to or lost.

How promising you are as a Student of the Game is a function of what you can pay attention to without running away. Nets and fences can be mirrors. And between the nets and fences, opponents are also mirrors.

That you do not have to like a person in order to learn from him/her/it. That loneliness is not a function of solitude.

‘I said I think I’m being followed.’ ‘Some men are born to lead, O.’

Like most very large men, he’s getting comfortable early with the fact that his place in the world is very small and his real impact on other persons even smaller

and the rest of the worst of them all sat still and listened without blinking, looking not just at the speaker’s face but into it,

is encouraged to say a few words, like eight: ‘Thanks everybody and I hope you like it,’ is what he said this year,

‘The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.’

‘The burning doesn’t go away?’ ‘What fire dies when you feed it?

This is the price of the free pursuit. Not everybody learns it in childhood, how to balance his interests.’

‘Getting In Touch With Your Feelings’ is another quilted-sampler-type cliché that ends up masking something ghastly deep and real, it turns out.

a kind of reverse-Buddhism, a state of Total Worry.

puke-white Irish

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

and there’s always this slight hangnail of fear, like clinging, whenever he likes somebody. It’s like something terrible could happen at any time.

He said he used to wear a four-piece suit and the fourth piece was him.’

If you close your eyes on a busy urban sidewalk the sound of everybody’s different footwear’s footsteps all put together sounds like something getting chewed by something huge and tireless and patient.

Everything becomes an outline of the thing. Objects become schemata. The world becomes a map of the world. An anhedonic can navigate, but has no location.

Maybe it’s the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip

Something has taken the tight ratchet in Joelle’s belly and turned it three turns to the good.

Never trust a man on the subject of his own parents.

She didn’t feel lonely in the place without him, but she did feel alone, what alone was going to feel like, and she, no one’s fool, 305 was erecting fortifications real early into it.

She could detect nothing fake about the lady’s grace and cheer toward her, the goodwill. And at the same time felt sure in her guts’ pit that the woman could have sat there and cut out Joelle’s pancreas and thymus and minced them and prepared sweetbreads and eaten them chilled and patted her mouth without batting an eye.

this pretense that overt eccentricity was the same as openness.

that the woman who kills you is always your next life’s mother.

the mothers are trying frantically to make amends for a murder neither of you quite remember.

He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over.

somebody he trusts himself to need

genuine pathological openness is about as seductive as Tourette’s syndrome.

Why do many parents who seem relentlessly bent on producing children who feel they are good persons deserving of love produce children who grow to feel they are hideous persons not deserving of love who just happen to have lucked into having parents so marvelous that the parents love them even though they are hideous?

‘Inc, what I know about your Da could be inscribed with a blunt crayon along the rim of a shot glass.

“so full of himself he could have shit limbs.”

not “valuable ” but “valued.”