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“Infinite Jest is an endurance contest. You manage to get through it and you have no choice but to say you like it. Otherwise, you have to deal with the fact that you just wasted weeks of your life,”
In the fifteen or so years he has known her, A.J. thinks Ismay has aged like an actress should: from Juliet to Ophelia to Gertrude to Hecate.
She was pretty and smart, which makes her death a tragedy. She was poor and black, which means people say they saw it coming.
“Love you,” Maya says. “Yes, she keeps saying that,” A.J. says. “I warned her about giving love that hasn’t yet been earned, but honestly, I think it’s the influence of that insidious Elmo. He loves everyone, you know?”
He feels drunk or at least carbonated.
The most annoying thing about it is that once a person gives a shit about one thing, he finds he has to start giving a shit about everything.
The place Maya loves most is downstairs because downstairs is the store, and the store is the best place in the world.
Here are some other things she wonders about. How do you learn to read? Why do grown-ups like books without pictures? Will Daddy ever die? What is for lunch?
“Sometimes books don’t find us until the right time.”
“I hate it,” she says. “And I don’t say that about many things. Teachers assign it, and parents are happy because their kids are reading something of ‘quality.’ But it’s forcing kids to read books like that that make them think they hate reading.”
pretty much every bad thing in life is a result of bad timing, and every good thing is the result of good timing.”
“That’s one of those things you say to sound smart, right?” she says. “But, really, you’re trying to make someone else feel stupid.”
(In reading Twain, I often suspect he is having more fun than I am.)
“Is it really worth the money for two more years that are likely to be crappy?” he asks Amelia. “It is,” she says, taking his hand.
“I love you,” she says with a resigned shrug. “I want to leave you with something cleverer than that, but it’s all I know.”
A place ain’t a place without a bookstore,
