“Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere Mary went, the lights became erratic.”
Work
A gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are. Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human - and one of those rare books that renew the idea of what a novel can do.
Quotes
Showing 1-13 of 13
David Foster Wallace
Canonical work source
“Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere Mary went, the lights became erratic.”
“That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. Th...”
“How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?”
“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”
“We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately (...) To games or needles, to some other person.”
“So tonight to shush you how about if I say I have administrative bones to pick with God, Boo. I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty...”
“Time wasn't passing so much as kneeling beside him in a torn tee-shirt disclosing the rodent-nosed tits of a man who disdains the care of his once-comely bod.”
“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”
“Why is the truth usually not just un- but anti-interesting?”
“It's always seemed a little preposterous that Hamlet, for all his paralyzing doubt about everything, never once doubts the reality of the ghost. Never questions his own madness might not in...”
“This is why they started us here so young: to give ourselves away before the age when the questions 'why' and 'to what' grow real beaks and claws.”
“I'm so scared of dying without ever being really seen. Can you understand?”
“...when he kneels at other times and prays or meditates or tries to achieve a Big-Picture spiritual understanding of God as he can understand Him, he feels Nothing — not nothing, but Nothing...”