String Theory Quotes

“There is about world-class athletes carving out exemptions from physical laws a transcendent beauty that makes manifest God in man.”
― David Foster Wallace, String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis

“Of course, in men’s sports no one ever talks about beauty, or grace, or the body. Men may profess their “love” of sports, but that love must always be cast and enacted in the symbology of war: elimination vs. advance, hierarchy of rank and standing, obsessive stats and technical analysis, tribal and/or nationalist fervor, uniforms, mass noise, banners, chest-thumping, face-painting, etc.”
― David Foster Wallace, On Tennis: Five Essays

“It may well be that we spectators, who are not divinely giftes as athletes, are the only ones truly able to see, articulate and animate the experience of the gift we are denied.”
― David Foster Wallace, String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis

“Almost anyone who loves tennis and follows the men’s tour on television has, over the last few years, had what might be termed Federer Moments. These are times, watching the young Swiss at play, when the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see if you’re OK.”
― David Foster Wallace, String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis

“The top seed this weekend is Richard Krajicek,12 a 6′5″ Dutchman who wears a tiny white billed hat in the sun and rushes the net like it owes him money and in general plays like a rabid crane.”
― David Foster Wallace, On Tennis: Five Essays

“I had gotten so prescient at using stats, surface, sun, gusts, and a kind of stoic cheer that I was regarded as a physical savant, a medicine boy of wind and heat, and could play just forever, sending back moonballs baroque with spin. Antitoi, uncomplicated from the get-go, hit the everliving shit out of every round object that came within his ambit, aiming always for one of two backcourt corners. He was a Slugger; I was a Slug.”
― David Foster Wallace, On Tennis: Five Essays

“Whether anything like a nascent Federer was here among these juniors can't be known, of course. Genius is not replicable. Inspiration, though, is contagious, and multiform - and even just to see, close up, power and aggression made vulnerable to beauty is to feel inspired and (in a fleeting, mortal way) reconciled.”
― David Foster Wallace, String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis

“One wouldn't want to make too much of it, or to pretend that it's any sort of equitable balance; that would be grotesque. But the truth is that whatever deity, entity, energy, or random genetic flux produces sick children also produced Roger Federer, and just look at him down there. Look at that.”
― David Foster Wallace, String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis

“The thing with Federer is that he's Mozart and Metallica at the same time, and the harmony's somehow exquisite.”
― David Foster Wallace, String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis

“Autumn, usually about half as bad as spring, was a low constant roar and the massive clicking sound of continents of dry leaves being arranged into force-curves—I’d heard no sound remotely like this megaclicking until I heard, at nineteen, on New Brunswick’s Bay of Fundy, my first high-tide wave break and get sucked back out over a shore of polished pebbles.”
― David Foster Wallace, On Tennis: Five Essays

“I submit that tennis is the most beautiful sport there is,40 and also the most demanding. It requires body control, hand-eye coordination, quickness, flat-out speed, endurance, and that strange mix”
― David Foster Wallace, On Tennis: Five Essays

“jumping rope or running laps backward or doing star-drills between the court’s corners or straight sprints back and forth along the perfect furrows of early beanfields each morning—once the first pain and fatigue of butterflies are got through,”
― David Foster Wallace, On Tennis: Five Essays

“Agassi, who is 25 (and of whom you have heard and then some), is kind of Michael Joyce’s hero. Just last week, at the Legg Mason Tennis Classic in Washington D.C., in wet-mitten heat that had players vomiting on-court and defaulting all over the place, Agassi beat Joyce in the third round of the main draw, 6”
― David Foster Wallace, On Tennis: Five Essays