The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

by David Foster Wallace

Electric sounds of insects at their business.

At root, Sylvanshine saw himself as a dithering ninny with at most one marginal talent whose connection to him was itself marginal.

It was true: The entire ball game, in terms of both the exam and life, was what you gave attention to vs. what you willed yourself to not.

Tedium is like stress but its own Category of Woe.

The whole ball game was perspective, filtering, the choice of perception’s objects.

That what appears to be egoism so often isn’t.

He doesn’t know everybody’s always going around all the time with something wrong and believing they’re exerting great willpower and control to keep other people, for whom they think nothing’s ever wrong, from seeing it. This is the way of people.

his third post in four years and still a GS-9 with a promise of 11 if he passed the CPA exam this spring and acquitted himself well in this post as Systems’ eyes on the ground

now he felt like he could see the edge or outline of what a real vision of hell might be. It was of two great and terrible armies within himself, opposed and facing each other, silent. There would be battle but no victor.

He was not a hypocrite, just broken and split off like all men.