Girl with Curious Hair Quotes

“We all have our little solipsistic delusions, ghastly intuitions of utter singularity: that we are the only one in the house who ever fills the ice-cube tray, who unloads the clean dishwasher, who occasionally pees in the shower, whose eyelid twitches on first dates; that only we take casualness terribly seriously; that only we fashion supplication into courtesy; that only we hear the whiny pathos in a dog’s yawn, the timeless sigh in the opening of the hermetically-sealed jar, the splattered laugh in the frying egg, the minor-D lament in the vacuum’s scream; that only we feel the panic at sunset the rookie kindergartner feels at his mother’s retreat. That only we love the only-we. That only we need the only-we. Solipsism binds us together, J.D. knows. That we feel lonely in a crowd; stop not to dwell on what’s brought the crowd into being. That we are, always, faces in a crowd.”
― David Foster Wallace, Girl with Curious Hair

“Hell hath no fury like a coolly received postmodernist.”
― David Foster Wallace, Girl With Curious Hair

“Tell them there are no holes for your fingers in the masks of men. Tell them how could you ever even hope to love what you can't grab onto.”
― David Foster Wallace, Girl With Curious Hair

“Look. Listen. Use ears I'd be proud to call our own. Listen to the silence behind the engines' noise. Jesus, Sweets, listen. Hear it? It's a love song.

For whom?

You are loved.”
― David Foster Wallace, Girl with Curious Hair

“And he wishes, in the cold quiet of his archer's heart, that he himself could feel the intensity of their reconciliations as strongly as he feels that of their battles.”
― David Foster Wallace, Girl With Curious Hair

“I'm not afraid of new things. I'm just afraid of feeling alone even when there's somebody else there. I'm afraid of feeling bad. Maybe that's selfish, but it's the way I feel.”
― David Foster Wallace, Girl With Curious Hair

“The reasons that center on others are easy to manipulate. All hollow things are light.”
― David Foster Wallace, Girl With Curious Hair

“Scenery is here. Wish you were beautiful.”
― David Foster Wallace, Girl With Curious Hair

“Like many Americans of his generation in this awkwardest of post-Imperial decades, an age suspended between exhaustion and replenishment, between input too ordinary to process and input too intense to bear, Sternberg is deeply ambivalent about being embodied; an informing fear that, were he really just an organism, he'd be nothing more than an ism of his organs.”
― David Foster Wallace, Girl With Curious Hair

“Dr. Ambrose himself told Mark Nechtr...that the problem with young people, starting sometime in about the 1960s, is that they tend to live too intensely inside their own social moment, and thus tend to see all existence past age thirty or so as somehow postcoital. It's then that they'll relax, settle back, sad animals, to watch- and learn, as Ambrose himself said he learned from hard artistic and academic experience- that life instead of being rated a hard R, or even a soft R, actually rarely even makes it into distribution. Tends to be too slow.”
― David Foster Wallace, Girl With Curious Hair

“Metafiction is untrue, as a lover. It cannot betray. It can only reveal. Itself is the only object. It's the act of a lonely solipsist's self-love, a night-light on the black fifth wall of being a subject, a face in a crowd. It's lovers not being lovers. Kissing their own spine. Fucking themselves. True, there are some gifted old contortionists out there. Ambrose and Robbe-Grillet and McElroy and Barthelme can fuck themselves awfully well.”
― David Foster Wallace, Girl With Curious Hair

“Even the novice alone can see quickly that a life conducted, temporarily or no, as a simple renunciation of value becomes at best something occluded and at worst something empty: a life of waiting for the will-be-never. Sitting in passive acceptance of (not judgment on) the happening and ending of things.”
― David Foster Wallace, Girl With Curious Hair

“We all have our little solipsistic delusions, ghastly intuitions of utter singularity: that we are the only one in the house who ever fills the ice-cube tray, who unloads the clean dishwasher, who occasionally pees in the shower, whose eyelid twitches on first dates; that only we take casualness terribly seriously, that only we fashion supplication into courtesy, that only we hear the whiny pathos in a dog's yawn, the timeless sigh in the opening of the hermetically-sealed jar, the splattered laugh in the frying egg, the minor-D lament in the vacuum's scream; that only we feel the panic at sunset the rookie kindergartener feels on his mother's retreating. That only we love the only-we. That only we need the only-we. Solipsism binds us together, J.D. knows. That we feel lonely in a crowd and stop not to dwell on what's brought the crowd into being. That we are, always, faces in a crowd.”
― David Foster Wallace, Girl with Curious Hair

“Leonard is far and away my least favorite relative, and I have no clue why I call him one night, collect, very late, and give him an involved and scrupulously fair edition of the whole story. We end up arguing. Leonard maintains that I am just like our mother and suffer from an unhappy and basically silly desire to be perfect; I sat that this has nothing constructive to do with anything I've said, and furthermore I fail to see what's so bad about wishing to be perfect, since being perfect would be...well, perfect. Leonard invites me to think about how boring it would be to be perfect. I defer to Leonard's extensive and hard-earned knowledge about being boring, but do point out that since being boring is an imperfection, it would by definition be impossible for a perfect person to be boring. Leonard says I've always enjoyed playing games with words in order to dodge the real meanings of things; this segues with suspicious neatness into my intuitions about the impending death of lexical utterance, and I'm afraid I indulge myself for several minutes before I realize that one of us has severed the connection. I curse Leonard's pipe, and his wife with a face like the rind of a ham.”
― David Foster Wallace, Girl With Curious Hair

“Everybody who really wants to knows what’s true. Most people just don’t want to. It means listening from deep inside. Most people just don’t want to. But the special people listen. You can hear what’s true, inside. Listen.”
― David Foster Wallace, Girl With Curious Hair

“Poetry, you were talking about,” Julie smiles, touching Faye’s cheek.
Faye lights a cigarette in the wind. “I’ve just never liked it. It beats around bushes. Even when I like it it’s nothing more than a really oblique way of saying the obvious, it seems like.”
Julie grins. Her front teeth have a gap. “Olé,” she says. “But consider how very, very few of us have the equipment to deal with the obvious.”
― David Foster Wallace, Girl with Curious Hair

“She regarded the things that were important to me as her enemy, not realizing that they were, in fact, the “me” she seemed so jealously to covet.”
― David Foster Wallace, Girl With Curious Hair

“She is silk in a bed of mail-order satin. Complete and seamless, an egg of sexual muscle. My motions atop her are dislocated, frantic, my lone interstice a trans-cultural spice of encouragement I smell with my spine. As, inside it, I go, I cry out to a god whose absence I have never felt to keenly.”
― David Foster Wallace, Girl with Curious Hair

“But and so things are slow, and like you they have this irritating suspicion that any real satisfaction is still way, way off, and it’s frustrating; but like basically decent kids they suck it up, bite the foil, because what’s going on is just plain real; and no matter what we want, the real world is pretty slow, at present, for kids our age. It probably gets less slow as you get older and more of the world is behind you, and less ahead, but very few people of our generation are going to find this exchange attractive, I’ll bet.”
― David Foster Wallace, Girl with Curious Hair

“It would take an architect who could hate enough to feel enough to love enough to perpetrate the kind of special cruelty only real lovers can inflict.”
― David Foster Wallace, Girl With Curious Hair

“It's no coincidence it's the gurus on mountains who're wise. You get to the top: you're already theirs.”
― David Foster Wallace, Girl with Curious Hair

“Aloft," intoned the damaged man.”
― David Foster Wallace, Girl with Curious Hair

“I begin to feel as though my thoughts and voice here are in some way the creative products of something outside me, not in my control, and yet that this shaping, determining influence outside me is still me. I feel a division which the outside voice posits as the labor pains of a nascent emotional conscience.”
― David Foster Wallace, Girl with Curious Hair

“Eyes the broad-shouldered faceless character that symbolizes Men’s Room, does Sternberg, and struggles with himself. He’s needed a bowel movement for hours, and since the LordAloft 7:10 lifted things have gotten critical. He tried, back at O’Hare. But he was unable to, because he was afraid to, afraid that Mark, who has the look of someone who never just has to, might enter the rest room and see Sternberg’s shoes under a stall door and know that he, Sternberg, was having a bowel movement in that stall, infer that Sternberg had bowels, and thus organs, and thus a body. Like many Americans of his generation in this awkwardest of post-Imperial decades, an age suspended between exhaustion and replenishment, between input too ordinary to process and input too intense to bear, Sternberg is deeply ambivalent about being embodied; an informing fear that, were he really just an organism, he’d be nothing more than an ism of his organs.”
― David Foster Wallace, Girl with Curious Hair

“She keeps her fingers on Faye’s face. Faye closes her eyes against tears. When she opens them Julie is still looking at her. She’s smiling a wonderful smile. Way past twenty. She takes Faye’s hands.“‘Then tell them to look closely at men’s faces. Tell them to stand perfectly still, for time, and to look into the face of a man. A man’s face has nothing on it. Look closely. Tell them to look. And not at what the faces do–men’s faces never stop moving–they’re like antennae. But all the faces do is move through different configurations of blankness.’

Faye looks for Julie’s eyes in the mirror.

Julie says, ‘Tell them there are no holes for your fingers in the masks of men. Tell them how could you ever even hope to have what you can’t grab onto.’

Julie turns her makeup chair and looks up at Faye. ‘That’s when I love you, if I love you,’ she whispers, running a finger down her white powdered cheek, reaching to trace an angled line of white onto Faye’s own face. 'Is when your face moves into expression. Try to look out from yourself, different, all the time. Tell people that you know your face is at least pretty at rest.’

'You asked me once how poems informed me,’ she says. Almost a whisper–her microphone voice. 'And you asked whether we, us, depended on the game, to even be. Baby?’–lifting Faye’s face with one finger under the chin–'Remember? Remember the ocean? Our dawn ocean, that we loved? We loved it because it was like us, Faye. That whole ocean was obvious. We were looking at something obvious, the whole time.’ She pinches a nipple, too softly for Faye even to feel. 'Oceans are only oceans when they move,’ Julie whispers. 'Waves are what keep oceans from just being very big puddles. Oceans are just their waves. And every wave in the ocean is finally going to meet what it moves toward, and break. The whole thing we looked at, the whole time you asked, was obvious. It was obvious and a poem because it was us. See things like that, Faye. Your own face, moving into expression. A wave, breaking on a rock, giving up its shape in a gesture that expresses that shape. See?’

It wasn’t at the beach that Faye had asked about the future. It was in Los Angeles. And what about the anomalous wave that came out of nowhere and broke on itself?

Julie is looking at Faye. 'See?’

Faye’s eyes are open. They get wide. 'You don’t like my face at rest?”
― David Foster Wallace, Girl with Curious Hair

“And here's a cliché' that's earned its status as a cliché': whether you're free or locked up depends, all and only, on what you want. What you have matters about as much as the color of your sky. Or your bars.”
― David Foster Wallace, Girl with Curious Hair

“That you just naturally want what we, your fathers, work night and day to make sure you want? Grow up, for Christ’s sake. Join the world. We produce what makes you want to need to consume. Advertising. Laxatives. HMO’s. Baking soda. Insurance. Your fears are built—and your wishes, on that foundation.”
― David Foster Wallace, Girl With Curious Hair

“But from special it’s not very far to Alone.”
― David Foster Wallace, Girl With Curious Hair

“Julie ha detto a Faye che lei è convinta che due persone innamorate attraversino tre fasi distinte prima di arrivare a conoscersi davvero. All'inizio si raccontano aneddoti e gusti personali. Poi ciascuno dei due dice all'altro in che cosa crede. E poi ciascuno osserva la relazione che c'è fra quello in cui l'altro ha detto di credere e quello che in effetti fa.”
― David Foster Wallace, Girl with Curious Hair

“Tell them there are no holes for your fingers in the masks of
men. Tell them how could you ever even hope to love what you can't
grab onto.”
― David Foster Wallace, Girl with Curious Hair