David Foster Wallace Quotes

... Like having to be able to say to yourself, 'I am pretending to sit here reading Albert Camus's The Fall for the Literature of Alienation midterm, but actually I'm really concentrating on listening to Steve try to impress this girl over the phone, and I am feeling embarrassment and contempt for him, and am thinking he's a poser, and at the same time I am also uncomfortably aware of times that I've also tried to project the idea of myself as hip and cynical so as to impress someone, meaning that not only do I sort of dislike Steve, which in all honesty I do, but part of the reason I dislike him is that when I listen to him on the phone it makes me see similarities and realize things about myself that embarrass me, but I don't know how to quit doing them - like, if I quit trying to seem nihilistic, even just to myself, then what would happen, what would I be like?

Can you "choose" something when you are forcefully and enthusiastically immersed in it at an age when the resources and information necessary for choosing are not yet yours?

From that day, whether I could articulate it satisfactorily or not,' Day says, holding the knee of the leg just crossed, 'I understood on an intuitive level why people killed themselves. If I had to go for any length of time with that feeling I'd surely kill myself.'
'Time in the shadow of the wing of the thing too big to see, rising.

Everything I've ever let go of has claw marks on it.

He'd cure himself by excess.

The modern woman's a mess of contradictions that they lay on themselves that drives them nuts.

Unless he actually had a lit gasper going, Calvin Thrust always has this way of being only technically wherever he was. There was always this air of imminent departure about him, like a man whose beeper was about to sound. It's like a lit gasper was psychic ballast for him or something. Everything he said to Gately seemed like it was going to be the last thing he said right before he looked at his watch and slapped his forehead and left.

The point of reptition is that 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 wred 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. The ball starts being something that you just know /ought/ to be in the air, spinning.

Rod and Tom and I had that three-planked platform-exhibit. One: waste. Two: no new enhancements. Three: find somebody outside the borders of our community selves to blame. T

Naive people are, more or less by definition, unaware that they're naive.

Lenz tells Green how once he was at a Halloween party where a hydrocephalic woman wore a necklace made of dead gulls.

-when he thinks of the starry-eyed puerility and narcissism of these fantasies now, a rough decade later, Schmidt experiences a kind of full-framed internal wince, that type of embarrassment-before-self that makes our most mortifying memories objects of fascination and repulsion at once, though in Terry Schmidt's case a certain amount of introspection and psychotherapy had enabled him to understand that his professional fantasies were not in the main all that unique, that a large percentage I bright young men and women locate the impetus behind their career choice in the belief that they are fundamentally different from the common run of man, unique and in certain crucial ways superior, more as it were central, meaningful
what else could explain the fact that they can and will make a difference in their chosen field simply by the fact that thy themselves have been at the exact center of all they've experienced for the whole 20 years of their conscious lives?

Atwater knew - as did everyone at Style, though by some strange unspoken consensus it was never said aloud - that this was the single great informing conflict of the American psyche. The management of insignificance. It was the great syncretic bond of US monoculture.

The thing that I think a lot of us forget is that part of the fault is the books ... you get this sort of cycle that as they become less important commercially they begin protecting their egos by talking more and more to each other and establishing themselves as this kind of tight cloistered world that doesn't really have anything to do with regular readers.

That 99 of compulsive thinkers' thinking is about themselves that 99 of this self-directed thinking consists of imagining and then getting ready for things that are going to happen to them and then weirdly that if they stop to think about it that 100 of the things they spend 99 of their time and energy imagining and trying to prepare for all the contingencies and consequences are never good. Then that this connects interestingly with the early-sobriety urge to pray for the literal loss of one's mind. In short that 99 of the head's thinking activity consists of trying to scare the everliving shit out of itself.

American human beings are a slippery and protean bunch in real life, hard as hell to get any kind of universal handle on.

He said he didn't think Lenore should go to the G.O.D.
"Nobody ever finds anybody in a place like that," he said, "People don't go to a place like that to look for other people. That's the opposite of the whole concept that's behind the thing.

My chest bumps like a dryer with shoes in it.

People who're somehow burned at birth, withered or ablated way past anything like what might be fair, they either curl up in their fire, or else they rise.

Really good work probably comes out of a willingness to disclose yourself, open yourself up in spiritual and emotional ways that risk making you look banal or melodramatic or naive or unhip or sappy, and to ask the reader really to feel something. To be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I'm scared about how sappy this'll look in print, saying this. And the effort actually to do it, not just talk about it, requires a kind of courage I don't seem to have yet.

Is it possible that future generations will regard our present agribuisness and eating practices in much the same way we now view Nero's entertainments or Mengele's experiments? My own initial reaction is that such a comparison is hysterical, extreme - and yet the reason it seems extreme to me appears to be that I believe animals are less morally important than human behings; and when it comes to defending such a belief, even to myself, I have to acknowledge that (a) I have an obvious selfish interest in this belief, since I like to eat certain kinds of animals and want to be able to keep doing it, and (b) I haven't succeeded in working out any sort of personal ethical system in which the belief is truly defensible instead of just selfishly convenient.

- That - to cut to a chase which the interviewers' hands-on-hip attitudes and replacement of the lamp's bulb with a much higher wattage signified they'd very much like to see cut to - as

You see parents as kind or unkind or happy or miserable or drunk or sober or great or near-great or failed the way you see a table square or a Montclair lip-read. Kids today... you kids today somehow don't know how to feel, much less love, to say nothing of respect. We're just bodies to you. We're just bodies and shoulders and scarred knees and big bellies and empty wallets and flasks to you. I'm not saying something cliché like you take us for granted so much as I'm saying you cannot... imagine our absence. We're so present it's ceased to mean. We're environmental. Furniture of the world.

Although the only way that I'm well known at Illinois State is that I am the "grammar Nazi." And so any student whose deployment of a semi-colon is not absolutely Mozart-esque knows that they're going to get a C in my class, and so my classes tend to have like four students in them. It's really a lot of fun.

Most of the writers I know are weird hybrids. There's a strong streak of egomania coupled with extreme shyness. Writing's kind of like exhibitionism in private. And there's also a strange loneliness, and a desire to have some kind of conversation with people, but not a real great ability to do it in person.

Knowing that internal stress could cause failure on the exam merely set up internal stress about the prospect of internal stress. There must be some other way to deal with the knowledge of the disastrous consequences fear and stress could bring about. Some answer or trick of the will: the ability not to think about it. What if everyone knew this trick but Claude Sylvanshine? ... What if there was something essentially wrong with Claude Sylvanshine that wasn't wrong with other people?

Numinous aura) - which balcony means that even the worst latex slip-and-slide off the steeply curved cerebrum's edge would mean a fall of only a few meters to the broad butylene platform, from which a venous-blue emergency ladder can be detached and lowered to extend down past the superior temporal gyrus and Pons and abducent to hook up with the polyurethane basilar-stem artery and allow a safe shimmy down to the good old oblongata just outside the rubberized meatus at ground zero.

Apeshit has rarely enjoyed so literal a denotation.

There are exactly as many R.L.-points in [0,1] as there are in [0,2].

The entire ball game, in terms of both the exam and life, was what you gave attention to vs. what you willed yourself to not.

in winter's watered-down light - just

It's specifically this Z = 2^(Aleph0) that he couldn't prove. Ever. Despite years of unimaginable doodling. Whether it's what unhinged him or not is an unanswerable question, but it is true that his inability to prove the C.H. caused Cantor pain for the rest of his life; he considered it his great failure. This too, in hindsight, is sad, because professional mathematicians now know exactly why G. Cantor could neither prove nor disprove the C.H. The reasons are deep and important and go corrosively to the root of axiomatic set theory's formal Consistency, in rather the same way that K. Godel's Incompleteness proofs deracinate all math as a formal system. Once again, the issues here can be only sketched or synopsized (although this time Godel is directly involved, so the whole thing is probably fleshed out in the Great Discoveries Series' Godel booklet).

desire is the sugar in human food.

But what sent his face clear down off his skull and broke him in two, though, was he said when he saw the Pam-shiny empty biscuit pan on top of the stove and the plastic rind of the peanut butter's safety-seal wrap on top of the wastebasket's tall pile. The little locket-picture in the back of his head swelled and became a sharp-focused scene of his wife and little girl and little unborn child eating what he now could see they must have eaten, last night and this morning, while he was out ingesting their groceries and rent. This was his cliff-edge, his personal intersection of choice, standing there loose-faced in the kitchen, running his finger around a shiny pan with not one little crumb of biscuit left in it. He sat down on the kitchen tile with his scary eyes shut tight but still seeing his little girl's face. They'd ate some charity peanut butter on biscuits washed down with tapwater and a grimace.

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.

The horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle: That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.
- David Foster Wallace, "Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness" (2005)

Notice, for instance, that Galileo does not pull out the old Aristotelian reductio and conclude from the paradoxical behavior of infinite sets that (infinity) can't be reasoned about. Instead, he manages somewhat to anticipate both Kant (by attributing (Infinity)-paradoxes to the hardwired constraints of 'finite minds' rather than to any extramental reality) and Cantor (by using one-to-one correspondence as a comparative measure of sets, by arguing that infinite quantities obey a different sort of arithmetic than do finite quantities, etc.)

really do do this,

But the truth is it's hard for me to know what I really think about any of the stuff I've written. It's always tempting to sit back and make finger-steeples and invent impressive sounding theoretical justifications for what one does, but in my case most of it'd be horseshit. As time passes I get less and less nuts about anything I've published, and it gets harder to know for sure when its antagonistic elements are in there because they serve a useful purpose and when their just covert manifestations of this "look-at-me-please-love-me-I-hate you" syndrome I still sometimes catch myself falling into. Anyway, but what I think I meant by "antagonize" or "aggravate" has to do with the stuff in the TV essay about the younger writer trying to struggle against the cultural hegemony of TV. One thing TV does is help us deny that we're lonely. With televised images, we can have the facsimile of a relationship without the work of a real relationship. It's an anesthesia of "form." The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness. You don't have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness, both of which are like sub-dreads of our dread of being trapped inside a self (a psychic self, not just a physical self), has to do with angst about death, the recognition that I'm going to die, and die very much alone, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily on without me. I'm not sure I could give you a steeple-fingere

Hal loathes sky-and-cloud wallpaper because it makes him feel high-altitude and disoriented and sometimes plummeting.

...a harried commuter is mistaken for Christ by a child he knocks over.

We're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we've never even met?

Ideally, each piece of art's its own unique object, and its evaluation's always present-tense.

You Can't Unring a Bell.

To become an abstraction: The Mother, Down On One Knee. This was life after he came - she orbits him, I chart her movements. That she could call him a blessing, the sun in her sky. She was no more the girl that I'd married.

[ ... ] his own father told him that talent is sort of a dark gift, that talent is its own expectation: it is there from the start and either lived up to or lost.

The only real significance she had attached to the memory was that it was funny what stuck with you.

TV's 'real' agenda is to be 'liked,' because if you like what you're seeing, you'll stay tuned. TV is completely unabashed about this; it's its sole raison.

people who feel that fiction should be easy to read, that it's a popular medium

The sharply precise divisions and boundaries, together with the fact that - wind and your more exotic-type spins aside - balls can be made to travel in straight lines only, make textbook tennis plane geometry. It is billiards with balls that won't hold still. It is chess on the run. It is to artillery and airstrikes what football is to infantry and attrition.

And just before 0145h. on 2 April Y.D.A.U., his wife arrived back home

Cornell University Press announced plans for a festschrift.

But from special it's not very far to Alone.

Mr. Bloemker moved closer. He smelled like a wet diaper. "What is it," he asked, looking over Lenore's shoulder.
"If it's what I think it is," said Lenore, "it's a sort of joke. A what do you call it. An antinomy."
"An antinomy?"
Lenore nodded. "Gramma really likes antinomies. I think this guy here," looking down at the drawing on the back of the label, "is the barber who shaves all and only those who do not shave themselves."
Mr. Bloemker looked at her. "A barber?"
"The big killer question," Lenore said to the sheet of paper, "is supposed to be whether the barber shaves himself. I think that's why his head's exploded, here."
"Beg pardon?"
"If he does, he doesn't, and if he doesn't, he does.

I guess that's supposed to be deconstruction's original program, right? People have been under some sort of metaphysical anesthesia, so you dismantle the metaphysics' axioms and prejudices, show it in cross section and reveal the advantages of its abandonment. It's literally aggravating: you awaken them to the fact that they've been unconsciously imbibing some narcotic pharmakon since they were old enough to say "Momma."
-Interview with Larry McCaffery (1993)

There is something magical to me about literature and fiction and I think it can do things not only that pop culture cannot do but that are urgent now: one is that by creating a character in a work of fiction you can allow a reader to leap over the wall of self and to allow him to imagine himself not only somewhere else but someone else in a way that television and movies, in a way that no other form can do. I think people are essentially lonely and alone and frightened of being alone.

I am not what you see and hear. -Hal

Which he said was the big lie they all bought that made doctors and standard therapy such a waste of time for people like us
they thought that diagnosis was the same as cure. That if you knew why, it would stop. Which is bullshit. You only stop if you stop.

I have filled 3 Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me.

Here are the basic principles of Constructivism as practiced by Kronecker and codified by J.H. Poincare and L.E.J. Brouwer and other major figures in Intuitionism: (1) Any mathematical statement or theorem that is more complicated or abstract than plain old integer-style arithmetic must be explicitly derived (i.e. 'constructed') from integer arithmetic via a finite number of purely deductive steps. (2) The only valid proofs in math are constructive ones, with the adjective here meaning that the proof provides a method for finding (i.e., 'constructing') whatever mathematical entities it's concerned with.

I'm awful sorry to bother. I can come back. I was wondering if maybe there was any special Program prayer for when you want to hang yourself.

It may sound reactionary, I know. But we can all feel it. We've changed the way we think of ourselves as citizens. We don't think of ourselves as citizens in the old sense of being small parts of something larger and infinitely more important to which we have serious responsibilities. We do still think of ourselves as citizens in the sense of being beneficiaries
we're actually conscious of our rights as American citizens and the nation's responsibilities to us and ensuring we get our share of the American pie. We think of ourselves now as eaters of the pie instead of makers of the pie. So who makes the pie?
...
Something has happened where we've decided on a personal level that it's all right to abdicate our individual responsibility to the common good and let government worry about the common good while we all go about our individual self-interested business and struggle to gratify our various appetites.

The most dangerous thing about an academic education is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract thinking instead of simply paying attention to what's going on in front of me.

a manual for how to build a mentally ill child

Like so many other nerdy, disaffected young people of that time, I dreamed of becoming an 'artist', i.e., somebody whose adult job was original and creative instead of tedious and dronelike.

Another way fathers impact sons is that sons, once their voices have changed in puberty, invariably answer the telephone with the same locutions and intonations as their fathers. This holds true regardless of whether the fathers are still alive.

They covet a vision of themselves as witnesses.

People, then, who are sad, but who can't let themselves feel sad, or express it, the sadness, I'm trying rather clunkily to say, these persons may strike someone who's sensitive as somehow just not quite right. Not quite there. Blank. Distant. Muted. Distant. Spacey was an American term we grew up with. Wooden. Deadened. Disconnected. Distant. Or they may drink alcohol or take other drugs. The drugs both blunt the real sadness and allow some skewed version of the sadness some sort of expression, like throwing someone through a living room window out into the flowerbeds she'd so very carefully repaired after the last incident.

The top seed this weekend is Richard Krajicek,12 a 6'5" Dutchman who wears a tiny white billed hat in the sun and rushes the net like it owes him money and in general plays like a rabid crane.

There's a certain kind of neurological makeup that goes along with being a writer, and having been in the room with a few other writers at the same time, it's rather wearing to be around. And it does - there is a kind of hypervigilance about it. Unfortunately it's got disadvantages. If you turn that hypervigilance on yourself and, for instance, whether or not you have a pimple on the end of your nose, it can get really depressing.

Enfield MA is one of the stranger little facts that make up the idea that is metro Boston, because it is a township composed almost entirely of medical, corporate, and spiritual facilities.

Why do prostitutes when they get straight always try and get so prim? It's like long-repressed librarian-ambitions come flooding out.

Maybe it's the fact the most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip - and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It's more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendant horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we've hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it's stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naivete.

I'm not saying that television is vulgar and dumb because the people who compose the Audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.

That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we're all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine ...

Well it totally freaks them out, what do you think? And I just about die of the embarrassment. I don't ever know what to say. What do you say if you just shouted "Victory for the Forces of Democratic Freedom!" right when you came?

That females are capable of being just as vulgar about sexual and eliminatory functions as males.

Another thing he laid in when he'd committed himself to one last marijuana vacation was petroleum jelly.

The music's still going, going absolutely nowhere, like Philip Glass on Quaaludes.

The boot, which was dull black and square-heeled, the motorcycle boot of persons who did not own motorcycles but wore the boots of those who did.

The mystery is why the right is now where the real energy is in US political life. Is this the really maddening question for anyone else sitting out here watching it all? Why is conservatism so hot right now? What accounts for its populist draw? It can't just be 9/11; it predates 9/11. But since just when has the right been so energized? Has there really been some reactionary Silent Majority out there for decades, frustrated but atomized, waiting for an inciting spark? If so, was Ronald Reagan that spark? But there wasn't this kind of right-wing populist verve to the Reagan eighties. Did it start with Gingrich's rise to Speaker, or with the intoxicating hatred of all things Clinton? Or has the country as a whole just somehow moved so far right that hard-core conservatism now feeds, stormlike, on the hot vortical energy of the mainstream?

The doctor gazed at her with a patience she was meant to see.

Over half the admits to psych wards are things like cheerleaders who swallow two bottles of Mydol over a high-school breakup or gray lonely asexual depressing people rendered inconsolable
by the death of a pet. The cathartic
trauma of actually going in somewhere officially Psych-, some understanding nods, some bare indication somebody gives half a damn – they rally, back out they go.

To be envied, admired, is not a feeling. Nor is fame it feeling. There are feelings associated with fame, but few of them are any more enjoyable than the feelings associated with envy of fame.

This by the way is known as Werther's Axiom, whereby quote The Intensity of a desire D is inversely proportional to the ease of D's gratification. Known also as Romance.

With words and tears she has amputated something form me. I gave her the intimate importance of me, and her bus pulled away, leaving something key of mine inside her like the weapon of a bee. All I want to do now is drive very away, to bleed.

In a companion essay to "Continuity and I.N." that's usually translated as "The Nature and Meaning of Numbers," Dedekind evinces a remarkable proof for his "Theorem 66. There exist infinite systems," which runs thus: "My own realm of thoughts, i.e., the totality S of all things which can be objects of my thought, is infinite. For if s signifies an element of S, then the thought s', that s can be an object of my thought, is itself an element of S,..." and so on, meaning that the infinite series ([s] + [s is an object of thought]+['s is an object of thought' is an object of thought] + ...) exists in the Gedankenwelt, which entails that the Gedankenwelt is itself infinite. With respect to this proof, notice (a) how closely it resembles the various Zeno-like VIR back in paragraph 2a, and (b) how easily we could object that the proof establishes only that Dedekind's Gedankenwelt is 'potentially infinite' (and in precisely Aristotle's sense of the term), since nobody can ever actually sit down and think a whole infinite series of (s+s'+s")-type thoughts-i.e., the series is a total abstraction.

You may not personally remember Vietnam or Watergate, but it's a good bet you remember "No new taxes" and "Out of the loop" and "No direct knowledge of any impropriety at this time" and "Did not inhale" and "Did not have sex with that Ms. Lewinsky" and etc. etc. It's painful to believe that the would-be "public servants" you're forced to choose between are all phonies whose only real concern is their own care and feeding and who will lie so outrageously and with such a straight face that you know they've just got to believe you're an idiot. So who wouldn't yawn and turn away, trade apathy and cynicism for the hurt of getting treated with contempt?

This is PCE's core fallacy - that a society's mode of expression is productive of its attitudes rather than a product of those attitudes 63 - and of course it's nothing but the obverse of the politically conservative SNOOT's delusion that social change can be retarded by restricting change in standard usage.

Who wouldn't love this jargon we dress common sense in: "formal innovation is no longer transformative, having been co-opted by the forces of stabilization and post-industrial inertia," blah, blah. But this co-optation might actually be a good thing if it helped keep younger writers from being able to treat mere formal ingenuity as an end in itself. MTV-type co-optation could end up a great prophylactic against cleveritis - you know, the dreaded grad-school syndrome of like "Watch me use seventeen different points of view in this scene of a guy eating a Saltine." The real point of that shit is "Like me because I'm clever" - which of course is itself derived from commercial art's axiom about audience-affection determining art's value.

For reasons that are not well understood, war's codes are safer for most of us than love's.

Something they seem to omit to mention in Boston AA when you're new and out of your skull with desperation and ready to eliminate your map and they tell you how it'll all get better and better as you abstain and recover: they somehow omit to mention that the way it gets better and you get better is through pain. Not around pain, or in spite of it.

…95 percent of political commentary, whether spoken or written, is now polluted by the very politics it's supposed to be about. Meaning it's become totally ideological and reductive: The writer/speaker has certain political convictions or affiliations, and proceeds to filter all reality and spin all assertion according to those convictions and loyalties. Everybody's pissed off and exasperated and impervious to argument from any other side. Opposing viewpoints are not just incorrect but contemptible, corrupt, evil […] Political discourse is now a formulaic matter of preaching to one's own choir and demonizing the opposition. Everything's relentlessly black-and-whitened…. Since the truth is way, way more gray and complicated than any one ideology can capture, the whole thing seems to me not just stupid but stupefying… How can any of this possibly help me, the average citizen, deliberate about whom to choose to decide my country's macroeconomic policy, or how even to conceive for myself what that policy's outlines should be, or how to minimize the chances of North Korea nuking the DMZ and pulling us into a ghastly foreign war, or how to balance domestic security concerns with civil liberties? Questions like these are all massively complicated, and much of the complication is not sexy, and well over 90 percent of political commentary now simply abets the uncomplicatedly sexy delusion that one side is Right and Just and the other Wrong and Dangerous. Which is of course a pleasant

It's no accident that in a bureaucracy getting fired is called 'termination,' as in ontological erasure.

Galileo's Two New Sciences was in certain respects one long raspberry at the Inquisition, whose treatment of G.G. is infamous. Part of this agenda was to have the dialogue's straight man act as a spokesman for Aristotelian metaphysics and Church credenda and to have his more enlightened partner slap him around intellectually. One of the main targets is Aristotle's ontological division of (infinity) into actual and potential, which the Church has basically morphed into the doctrine that only God is Actually Infinite and nothing else in His creation can be. Example: Galileo ridicules the idea that the number of parts that any line segment can be divided into is only 'potentially' (meaning unreal-ly) infinite by showing that if you bend the segment into a circle-which, 'a la Nicholas of Cusa, is defined as a regular polygon with a (infinity) of sides-you have "reduced to actuality that infinite number of parts into which you claimed, while it was straight, were contained in it only potentially.

He knew what the Beats know and what the great tennis player knows, son: learn to do nothing, with your whole head and body, and everything will be done by what's around you.

The truth is you've already heard this. That this is what it's like. That it's what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless inbent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can never show another soul. And you think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you're a fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you know this, and of course you try to manage what part they see if you know it's only a part. Who wouldn't? It's called free will, Sherlock. But at the same time it's why it feels so good to break down and cry in front of others, or to laugh, or speak in tongues, or chant in Bengali--it's not English anymore, it's not getting squeezed through any hole.

In this country we're unprecedentedly safe, comfortable, and well fed, with more and better venues for stimulation. And yet if you were asked, 'Is this a happy or unhappy country?' you'd check the 'unhappy' box. We're living in an era of emotional poverty, which is something that serious drug addicts feel most keenly.

He imagined that the clock's second hand possessed awareness and knew that it was a second hand and that its job was to around and around inside a circle of numbers forever at the same slow unvarying machinelike rate ...

An unpopular apres-garde filmmaker (Watt) either suffers a temporal lobe seizure and becomes mute or else is the victim of everyone else's delusion that his (Watt's) temporal lobe seizure has left him mute.