Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

Once he’d been set off inside, it mattered so much that he was somehow afraid to show how much it mattered.

Another way fathers impact sons is that sons, once their voices have changed in puberty, invariably answer the telephone with the same locutions and intonations as their fathers.

These worst mornings with cold floors and hot windows and merciless light—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.

Everyone should get at least one good look at the eyes of a man who finds himself rising toward what he wants to pull down to himself.