Infinitejest > Infinitejest's Quotes

“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?"

"I give."

"You get someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“...logical validity is not a guarantee of truth.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Some people—and I am one of them—hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin

“You tasted it. Isn't that enough? Of what do you ever get more than a taste? That's all we're given in life, that's all we're given of life. A taste. There is no more.”
― Philip Roth, The Dying Animal

“The future belongs to crowds.”
― Don DeLillo, Mao II

“When it rains out, it also rains in.”
― Don DeLillo, Mao II

“The city is a device for measuring time.”
― Don DeLillo, Mao II

“The thousands stand and chant. Around them in the world, people ride escalators going up and sneak secret glances at the faces coming down. People dangle teabags over hot water in white cups. Cars run silently on the autobahns, streaks of painted light. People sit at desks and stare at office walls. They smell their shirts and drop them in the hamper. People bind themselves into numbered seats and fly across time zones and high cirrus and deep night, knowing there is something they've forgotten to do.”
― Don DeLillo, Mao II

“It is a naked city. Faith is not pampered, nor hope encouraged; there is no place to lay one's exhaustion: but instead pinnacles skewer it undisguised against vacancy.”
― William Gaddis, The Recognitions

“Tragedy was foresworn, in ritual denial of the ripe knowledge that we are drawing away from one another, that we share only one thing, share the fear of belonging to another, or to others, or to God; love or money, tender equated in advertising and the world, where only money is currency, and under dead trees and brittle ornaments prehensile hands exchange forgeries of what the heart dare not surrender.”
― William Gaddis, The Recognitions

“How ... how fragile situations are. But not tenuous. Delicate, but not flimsy, not indulgent. Delicate, that's why they keep breaking, they must break and you must get the pieces together and show it before it breaks again, or put them aside for a moment when something else breaks and turn to that, and all this keeps going on. That's why most writing now, if you read it they go on one two three four and tell you what happened like newspaper accounts, no adjectives, no long sentences, no tricks they pretend, and they finally believe that they really believe that the way they saw it is the way it is ... it never takes your breath away, telling you things you already know, laying everything out flat, as though the terms and the time, and the nature and the movement of everything were secrets of the same magnitude. They write for people who read with the surface of their minds, people with reading habits that make the smallest demands on them, people brought up reading for facts, who know what's going to come next and want to know what's coming next, and get angry at surprises. Clarity's essential, and detail, no fake mysticism, the facts are bad enough. But we're embarrassed for people who tell too much, and tell it without surprise. How does he know what happened? unless it's one unshaven man alone in a boat, changing I to he, and how often do you get a man alone in a boat, in all this ... all this ... Listen, there are so many delicate fixtures, moving toward you, you'll see. Like a man going into a dark room, holding his hands down guarding his parts for fear of a table corner, and ... Why, all this around us is for people who can keep their balance only in the light, where they move as though nothing were fragile, nothing tempered by possibility, and all of a sudden bang! something breaks. Then you have to stop and put the pieces together again. But you never can put them back together quite the same way. You stop when you can and expose things, and leave them within reach, and others come on by themselves, and they break, and even then you may put the pieces aside just out of reach until you can bring them back and show them, put together slightly different, maybe a little more enduring, until you've broken it and picked up the pieces enough times, and you have the whole thing in all its dimensions. But the discipline, the detail, it's just ... sometimes the accumulation is too much to bear.”
― William Gaddis, The Recognitions

“The gross and net result of it is that people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who are nearly half people and half bicycles...when a man lets things go so far that he is more than half a bicycle, you will not see him so much because he spends a lot of his time leaning with one elbow on walls or standing propped by one foot at kerbstones.”
― Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman

“Io sono uno che ama e non ho trovato la cosa da amare.”
― Sherwood Anderson

“Qui il nulla è curvo, qui è rettilineo, qui si impenna, qui si inabissa, qui ruota, qui goccia, qui è arsura, qui è fame, qui è sonno, qui è sogno senza immagini dentro il sonno, qui è fumo, qui è foresta, qui è radura, qui è fuga, qui è ritorno, qui è dimora, qui è desolazione, qui è consolazione, qui è mano, qui è occhio, qui è piedi, qui è correre, qui è accorrere, qui è agguato, qui è cattura, qui è liberazione, qui è cielo, qui è inferi, qui è inizio, qui è fine, qui è durata, qui è conclusione, qui è inauguramento, qui è dipartita, qui è arrivo, qui, finalmente, è cava cavità di caverna".”
― Giorgio Manganelli

“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Atticus, he was real nice."

"Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“It's been a prevalent notion. Fallen sparks. Fragments of vessels broken at the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end, a gathering back to home. A messenger from the Kingdom, arriving at the last moment. But I tell you there is no such message, no such home -- only the millions of last moments . . . nothing more. Our history is an aggregate of last moments.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

“And the rest is rust and stardust.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Sometimes I see something so moving I know I’m not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave.”
― Don DeLillio, Underworld

“Time to leave now, get out of this room, go somewhere, anywhere; sharpen this feeling of happiness and freedom, stretch your limbs, fill your eyes, be awake, wider awake, vividly awake in every sense and every pore.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl

“By reading this message you are denying its existence and implying consent.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story

“The love I felt for her on that train ride had a capital and provinces, parishes and a Vatican, an orange planet and many sullen moons -- it was systemic and it was complete.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story

“There is something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that's unbearably sad. Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex in its causes and simple in its effect: on board the Nadir—especially at night—I felt despair. The wor's overused and banalified now, despair, but it's a serious word, and I'm using it seriously.”
― David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

“I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space.”
― Edwin Abbott Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions