John Davis

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Thomas Pynchon
“Time is never wasted if you remember to bring along something to read.”
Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day

Thomas Mann
“Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached state ... Time, we say, is Lethe; but change of air is a similar draught, and, if it works less thoroughly, does so more quickly.”
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

David Foster Wallace
“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

David Foster Wallace
“Some people, from what I've seen, boo, when they lie, they become very still and centered and their gaze very concentrated and intense. They try to dominate the person they lie to. The person to whom they're lying. Another type becomes fluttery and insubstantial and punctuates his lie with little self-deprecating motions and sounds, as if credulity were the same as pity. Some bury the lie in so many digressions and asides that they like try to slip the lie in there through all the extraneous data like a tiny bug through a windowscreen ... Then there are what I might call your Kamikaze-style liars. These'll tell you a surreal and fundamentally incredible lie, and then pretend a crisis of conscience and retract the original lie, and then offer you the like they really want you to buy instead, so the real lie'll appear a some kind of concession, a settlement with through. That type's mercifully easy to see through ... Or then the type who sort of overelaborates on the lie, buttresses it with rococo formations of detail and amendment, and that's how you can always tell ... So Now I've established a subtype of the over-elaborator type. This is the liar who used to be an over-elaborator and but has somehow snapped to the fact that rococo elaborations give him away every time, so he changes and now lies tersely, sparely, seeming somehow bored, like what he's saying is too obviously true to waste time on.”
David Foster Wallace

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

year in books
Jeremy
5,144 books | 129 friends

Eric Boss
0 books | 17 friends

Dale
44 books | 20 friends

Jeanine...
303 books | 528 friends

Carolyn
384 books | 26 friends

Trish W...
28 books | 81 friends

Elaine ...
4 books | 9 friends

Betty L...
0 books | 114 friends

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