Sarah’s Reviews > Infinite Jest > Status Update

It now lately sometimes seemed like some black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe.

“Boo,...I believe the only real monsters might be the type of liar where there’s simply no way to tell. The ones who give nothing away.’
‘But then how do you know they’re monsters, then?’
‘That’s the monstrosity right there, Boo, I’m starting to think.’
‘Golly Ned.’
‘That they walk among us. Teach our children. Inscrutable. Brass-faced.’

We’re a lot more i tuts out our lovers’ families than we are about our own families, she knew.

Mrs. Incadenza never punished and refused to act as if she believed lying was even a possibility as far as her children were concerned, and treated an exploded lie as an insoluble cosmic mystery instead of an exploded lie.

“‘Getting In Touch With Your Feelings’ is another quilted-sampler-type cliché that ends up masking something ghastly deep and real, it turns out.”

“You’re ordering me to pray? Because I allegedly have a disease? I dismantle my life and career and enter nine months if low-income treatment for a disease and I’m prescribed prayer? Does the word retrograde signify? Am I in a sociohistorical era I don’t know about? What exactly is the story here?”

“Even then, of course, the bulk of US consumers remained verifiably reluctant to leave home and teleputer and to interface personally, though this phenomenon’s endurance can’t be attributed to the videophony-fad per se, and anyway the new panagoraphobia served to open huge new entrepreneurial teleputerized markets for home-shopping and delivery, and didn’t cause much industry concern.” P151. Nailed it

May I be blessed to read this book for the rest of my life. Round three, here we go.