Infinite Jest

Quotes

Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 843  | Added on Sunday, January 29, 2012, 08:20 AM

The sun like a sneaky keyhole view of hell.
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Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 851-58  | Added on Sunday, January 29, 2012, 08:24 AM

A breeze sends the beach ball skating all the way across the blue pool to the other side, and Orin watches its noiseless glide. The white iron tables have no umbrellas, and you can tell where the sun is without looking; you can feel right where it is on your body and project from there. The ball moves tentatively back out toward the middle of the pool and then stays there, not even bobbing. The same small breezes make the rotted palms along the condominium complex's stone walls rustle and click, and a couple of fronds detach and spiral down, hitting the deck with a slap. All the plants out here are malevolent, heavy and sharp. The parts of the palms above the fronds are tufted in sick stuff like coconut-hair. Roaches and other things live in the trees. Rats, maybe. Loathsome high-altitude critters of all kinds. All the plants either spiny or meaty. Cacti in queer tortured shapes. The tops of the palms like Rod Stewart's hair, from days gone by.
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Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 862-67  | Added on Sunday, January 29, 2012, 08:26 AM

Watching the Jacuzzi funnel and bubble and foam around the leg. And out of nowhere a bird had all of a sudden fallen into the Jacuzzi. With a flat matter-of-fact plop. Out of nowhere. Out of the wide empty sky. Nothing overhung the Jacuzzi but sky. The bird seemed to have just had a coronary or something in flight and died and fallen out of the empty sky and landed dead in the Jacuzzi, right by the leg. He brought his sunglasses down onto the bridge of his nose with a finger and looked at it. It was an undistinguished kind of bird. Not a predator. Like a wren, maybe. It seems like no way could it have been a good sign. The dead bird bobbed and barrel-rolled in the foam, sucked under one second and reappearing the next, creating an illusion of continued flight.

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Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 1453-54  | Added on Wednesday, August 07, 2013, 10:14 AM

The doctor's small nods were designed to appear not as responses but as invitations to continue, what Dretske called Momentumizers.
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Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 1487-90  | Added on Wednesday, August 07, 2013, 10:17 AM

'So you'd say anxiety is a big part of your depressions.’ It was now not clear whether she was responding to the doctor or not. 'Everything gets horrible. Everything you see gets ugly. Lurid is the word. Doctor Carton said lurid, one time. That's the right word for it. And everything sounds harsh, spiny and harsh-sounding, like every sound you hear all of a sudden has teeth. And smelling like I smell bad even after I just got out of the shower. It's like what's the point of washing if everything smells like I need another shower.’
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Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 2038-39  | Added on Wednesday, August 07, 2013, 07:53 PM

Sometimes he finds out he believes something that he doesn't even know he believed until it exits his mouth in front of five anxious little hairless plump trusting clueless faces.
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Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 2239-48  | Added on Thursday, August 08, 2013, 09:29 AM

conducting technical interviews,4444 used silent pauses as integral parts of his techniques of interface. Here it defused Marathe. Marathe felt the ironies of his position. One strap of Steeply's prostheses' brassiere had slipped into view below his shoulder, where it cut deeply into his flesh of the upper arm. The air smelled faintly of creosote, but much less strongly smelling than the ties of train tracks, which Marathe had smelled at close range. Steeply's back was broad and soft. Marathe eventually said: 'You in such a case have nothing. You stand on nothing. Nothing of ground or rock beneath your feet. You fall; you blow here and there. How does one say: "tragically, unvoluntarily, lost." Another silence ensued. Steeply farted mildly. Marathe shrugged. The B.S.S. Field Operative Steeply may not have been truly sneering. The city Tucson's lume appeared a bleached and ghostly white in the unhumid air. Crepuscular animals rustled and perhaps scuttled. Dense and unbeautiful spider webs of the poisonous U.S.A. species of spider Black Widow were beneath the shelf and the incline's other outcroppíngs. And when the wind hit certain angles in the mountainside it moaned. Marathe thought of his victory over the train that had taken his legs.45
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Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 2383-85  | Added on Thursday, August 08, 2013, 09:39 AM

or else floods his eyes with Murine and heads down to the Headmaster's House for another late dinner with C.T. and the Moms, and eats like such a feral animal that the Moms says it does something instinctively maternal in her heart good to see him pack it away, but then he wakes before dawn with awful indigestion.
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Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 2397-2400  | Added on Thursday, August 08, 2013, 09:40 AM

You've got what he calls your Despairing type, who's fine as long as he's in the quick-improvement stage before a plateau, but then he hits a plateau and sees himself seem to stall, not getting better as fast or even seeming to get a little worse, and this type gives in to frustration and despair, because he hasn't got the humbleness and patience to hang in there and slog, and he can't stand the time he has to put in on plateaux, and what happens?’
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Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 2447-52  | Added on Thursday, August 08, 2013, 09:45 AM

Accretive means accumulating, through sheer mindless repeated motions. The machine-language of the muscles. Until you can do it without thinking about it, play. At like fourteen, give and take, they figure here. Just do it. Forget about is there a point, of course there's no point. The point of repetition is there is no point. Wait until it soaks into the hardware and then see the way this frees up your head. A whole shitload of head-space you don't need for the mechanics anymore, after they've sunk in. Now the mechanics are wired in. Hardwired in. This frees the head in the remarkablest ways. Just wait. You start thinking a whole different way now, playing. The court might as well be inside you. The ball stops being a ball.

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Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 3223-26  | Added on Friday, August 23, 2013, 07:17 PM

you should see Pemulis with an emulsion curve, yawning blasély under his bill-reversed yachting hat and scratching an armpit, juggling differentials like a boy born to wear a pocket-protector and high-water corduroys and electrician's tape on his hornrims' temples, asking Mario if he knows what you call three Canadians copulating on a snowmobile. Mario and his brother Hal both consider Pemulis a good friend, though friendship at E.T.A. is nonnego-tiable currency.
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Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 3528-29  | Added on Friday, August 23, 2013, 08:34 PM

how the drunk and the maimed both are dragged forward out of the arena like a boneless Christ, one man under each arm, feet dragging, eyes on the aether.
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Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 4205-8  | Added on Saturday, November 16, 2013, 08:23 PM

Or that sometime after your Substance of choice has just been taken away from you in order to save your life, as you hunker down for required a.m. and P.M. prayers, you will find yourself beginning to pray to be allowed literally to lose your mind, to be able to wrap your mind in an old newspaper or something and leave it in an alley to shift for itself, without you.
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Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 4232  | Added on Saturday, November 16, 2013, 08:28 PM

That loneliness is not a function of solitude.
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Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 4246-47  | Added on Saturday, November 16, 2013, 08:29 PM

That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
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Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 4256-57  | Added on Saturday, November 16, 2013, 08:30 PM

That 99% of compulsive thinkers' thinking is about themselves;
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Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 4263-64  | Added on Saturday, November 16, 2013, 08:31 PM

That the people to be most frightened of are the people who are the most frightened. That it takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak.
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Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 4272-73  | Added on Saturday, November 16, 2013, 08:33 PM

That other people can often see things about you that you yourself cannot see, even if those people are stupid.
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Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 4275-76  | Added on Saturday, November 16, 2013, 08:33 PM

That having a lot of money does not immunize people from suffering or fear. That trying to dance sober is a whole different kettle of fish.
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Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 4284  | Added on Saturday, November 16, 2013, 08:34 PM

That having sex with someone you do not care for feels lonelier than not having sex in the first place, afterward.
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Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 4285-86  | Added on Saturday, November 16, 2013, 08:34 PM

That everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else. That this isn't necessarily perverse.
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Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 4287-90  | Added on Saturday, November 16, 2013, 08:34 PM

That God — unless you're Charlton Heston, or unhinged, or both — speaks and acts entirely through the vehicle of human beings, if there is a God. That God might regard the issue of whether you believe there's a God or not as fairly low on his/her/its list of things s/he/it's interested in re you.
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Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 4294-95  | Added on Saturday, November 16, 2013, 08:35 PM

The shopworn 'Act in Haste, Repent at Leisure' would seem to have been almost custom-designed for the case of tattoos.

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