Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

And then but so what’s the difference between tennis and suicide, life and death, the game and its own end? It’s always Schtitt who ends up experimenting with some exotic ice-cream flavor, when they arrive. Mario always chickens out and opts for good old basic chocolate when the moment of decision at the counter comes. Thinking along the lines of like Better the flavor you know for sure you already love. ‘And so. No different, maybe,’ Schtitt concedes, sitting up straight on a waffle-seated aluminum chair with Mario beneath an askew umbrella that makes the flimsy little table it’s rooted to shake and clank in the sidewalk’s breeze. ‘Maybe no different, so,’ biting hard into his tricolored cone. He feels at the side of his white jaw, where there’s some sort of red welt, it looks like. ‘Not different’—looking out into the Ave.’s raised median at the Green Line train rattling past downhill—‘except the chance to play.’ He brightens in preparation to laugh in his startling German roar, saying ‘No? Yes? The chance to play, yes?’ And Mario loses a dollop of chocolate down his chin, because he has this involuntary thing where he laughs whenever anyone else does, and Schtitt is finding what he has just said very amusing indeed.

Possibly the most important section re: the drive of athleticism and E.T.A. philosophy in general. "The chance to play, yes?" is something I've shouted good-naturedly more than once after taking up this book a few times.