Infinite Jest
Rate it:
Open Preview
Started reading November 16, 2025
8%
Flag icon
The wind was moderate and constant and of about the temperature of a U.S.A. clothes-dryer set on Low.
8%
Flag icon
‘Particularly a Canadian pulse.’
8%
Flag icon
There’s such a thing as political sex.’
8%
Flag icon
‘Still: twenty-three human beings lost for all time: that’d be some hoax, no?’
8%
Flag icon
The herd is descended from two domestic hamsters set free by a Watertown NY boy at the beginning of the Experialist migration in the subsidized Year of the Whopper. The boy now attends college in Champaign IL and has forgotten that his hamsters were named Ward and June.
8%
Flag icon
Feral hamsters are not pets. They mean business.
Michael Lumbera Jr
yup
8%
Flag icon
Marathe believed that something in Steeply enjoyed his grotesque appearance and craved the humiliation of the field-disguises his B.S.S. superiors requested of him.
8%
Flag icon
Marathe said: ‘… have I merely pretended to pretend to pretend to betray.’ 42
8%
Flag icon
Steeply had found his triceps’ scratch and twisted the flesh of his arm to examine it, his rouged lips rounded with concern.
9%
Flag icon
John Wayne, as do most Canadians, lifts one leg slightly to fart,
9%
Flag icon
Sometimes he finds out he believes something that he doesn’t even know he believed until it exits his mouth
9%
Flag icon
The twice-weekly (more like once-weekly, as things usually pan out)
Michael Lumbera Jr
just like band practice
9%
Flag icon
‘Need a whole new syntax for fatigue on days like this,’
9%
Flag icon
Hal worries secretly that he looks half-feminine.
9%
Flag icon
‘It’d be like a pleasant fatigue if I could just go up after dinner and hunker on down with the mind in neutral and watch something uncomplex.’
9%
Flag icon
Pemulis loves to sing around tile.
9%
Flag icon
Hal, Stice, Troeltsch, Struck, Rader, and Beak are all rhythmically squeezing tennis balls with their racquet-hands, as per Academy mandate.
9%
Flag icon
they’ve all been just here before, just like this, and will be again tomorrow.
9%
Flag icon
The room’s emotions seem to be inverting themselves every couple seconds.
9%
Flag icon
Paris and Helen were the excuse of the war.
9%
Flag icon
‘The point is that what launches vessels of war is the state and community and its interests,’ Marathe said without heat, tiredly. ‘You only wish to enjoy to pretend for yourself that the love of one woman could do this, launch so many vessels of alliance.’
9%
Flag icon
‘As, if you will give the permission, does this love you speak of, M. Tine’s grand love. It means only the attachment. Tine is attached, fanatically. Our attachments are our temple, what we worship, no? What we give ourselves to, what we invest with faith.’
9%
Flag icon
‘Are we not all of us fanatics?
10%
Flag icon
‘You U.S.A.’s do not seem to believe you may each choose what to die for. Love of a woman, the sexual, it bends back in on the self, makes you narrow, maybe crazy. Choose with care. Love of your nation, your country and people, it enlarges the heart. Something bigger than the self.’
10%
Flag icon
‘Make amusement all you wish. But choose with care. You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice. You, M. Hugh Steeply: you would die without thinking for what?’
Michael Lumbera Jr
hmm
10%
Flag icon
His expression of boredom could be real or tactical, either of these.
10%
Flag icon
‘This, is it not the choice of the most supreme importance? Who teaches your U.S.A. children how to choose their temple? What to love enough not to think two times?’
10%
Flag icon
‘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?’ Marathe’s sniff held disdain. ‘Then in such a case your temple is self and sentiment. Then in such an instance you are a fanatic of desire, a slave to your individual subjective narrow self’s sentiments; a citizen of nothing. You become a citizen of nothing. You are by yourself and alone, kneeling to yourself.’
Michael Lumbera Jr
ahh
10%
Flag icon
six, seven years,
10%
Flag icon
Though when the viewer’s on it looks like the room has a window.
10%
Flag icon
‘Don’t Think Just See Don’t Know Just Flow’
Michael Lumbera Jr
yeah
10%
Flag icon
video mags, action photos in glossy print-mags.
10%
Flag icon
O.N.A.N.C.A.A.’s.’
10%
Flag icon
the point is notice we were all sitting there all feeling the same way together.’
10%
Flag icon
‘We’re all on each other’s food chain. All of us. It’s an individual sport. Welcome to the meaning of individual. We’re each deeply alone here. It’s what we all have in common, this aloneness.’
10%
Flag icon
‘In a nutshell, what we’re talking about here is loneliness.’
10%
Flag icon
After a bad P.M. set we all, however briefly, get to feel we have a common enemy. This is their gift to us. Their medicine. Nothing brings you together like a common enemy.’
10%
Flag icon
the kid so repels Hal because Hal sees in the kid certain parts of himself he can’t or won’t accept. None of this ever occurs to Hal when Ingersoll’s in the room. He wishes him ill.
10%
Flag icon
you proceed toward mastery through a series of plateaus, so there’s like radical improvement up to a certain plateau and then what looks like a stall, on the plateau, with the only way to get off one of the plateaus and climb up to the next one up ahead is with a whole lot of frustrating mindless repetitive practice and patience and hanging in there.’
10%
Flag icon
Despairing type,
10%
Flag icon
Obsessive type,
10%
Flag icon
Complacent type,
10%
Flag icon
it’s repetitive movements and motions for their own sake, over and over until the accretive weight of the reps sinks the movements themselves down under your like consciousness into the more nether regions, through repetition they sink and soak into the hardware, the C.P.S. The machine-language. The autonomical part that makes you breathe and sweat. It’s no accident they say you Eat, Sleep, Breathe tennis here. These are autonomical. Accretive means accumulating, through sheer mindless repeated motions. The machine-language of the muscles. Until you can do it without thinking about it, play.
10%
Flag icon
Now the mechanics are wired in. Hardwired in. This frees the head in the remarkablest ways. Just wait. You start thinking a whole different way now, playing.
Michael Lumbera Jr
like guitar
10%
Flag icon
You’re just going through the motions. Think about the phrase: Going Through The Motions. Wiring them into the motherboard. You guys don’t know how good you’ve got it right now.’
11%
Flag icon
Do you start kertwanging back? Tit for tat? What do you do?’
11%
Flag icon
If you still win, you’ll have grown inside as a person.’ ‘If you lose?’ ‘If you lose, you do something private and unpleasant to his water-jug right before his next round.’
11%
Flag icon
‘Say you have to fart.’
11%
Flag icon
you’re running around trying to compete with a terrible hot nasty uncomfortable fart riding around the court inside you.’
11%
Flag icon
it’s about how to reach down into parts of yourself you didn’t know were there and get down in there and live inside these parts.
Michael Lumbera Jr
like music