Infinite Jest Quotes

It now lately sometimes seemed a 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 their 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. ~ David Foster Wallace

Infinite Jest' is just awful. It seems ridiculous to have to say it. ~ Harold Bloom

When David Markson wrote in June to complain about an author's getting an award he though should have been his, Wallace gently warned him away from the pitfall of envy: Mostly I try to remember how lucky I am to be able to write, and doubly, triply lucky I am that anyone else is willing to read it, to say nothing of publishing it. I'm no pollyanna - this keeping-the-spirits-up shit is hard work, and I don't often do it well. But I try ... Life is good ~ D.T. Max

[The entire text of Infinite Jest.] ~ David Foster Wallace

IT'S HARDLY a coincidence that "Shipping Out," Wallace's most well-known essay, appeared only a month before Infinite Jest, his most well-known novel, was published. Both are about the same thing (amusing ourselves to death), with different governing données (lethally entertaining movie, lethally pampering leisure cruise). In an interview after the novel came out, Wallace, asked what's so great about writing, said that we're existentially alone on the planet - I can't know what you're thinking and feeling, and you can't know what I'm thinking and feeling - so writing, at its best, is a bridge constructed across the bridge of human loneliness. ~ David Shields

Suffice it to say I was compelled to create this group in order to find everyone who is, let's say, borrowing liberally from my INESTIMABLE FOLIO OF CANONICAL MASTERPIECES (sorry, I just do that sometimes), and get you all together. It's the least I could do.

I mean, seriously. Those soliloquies in Moby-Dick? Sooo Hamlet and/or Othello, with maybe a little Shylock thrown in. Everyone from Pip in Great Expectations to freakin' Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre mentions my plays, sometimes completely mangling my words in nineteenth-century middle-American dialect for humorous effect (thank you, Sir Clemens). Many people (cough Virginia Woolf cough) just quote me over and over again without attribution. I hear James Joyce even devoted a chapter of his giant novel to something called the "Hamlet theory," though do you have some sort of newfangled English? It looks like gobbledygook to me. The only people who don't seek me out are like Chaucer and Dante and those ancient Greeks. For whatever reason.

And then there are the titles. The Sound and the Fury? Mine. Infinite Jest? Mine. Proust, Nabokov, Steinbeck, and Agatha Christie all have titles that are me-inspired. Brave New World? Not just the title, but half the plot has to do with my work. Even Edgar Allan Poe named a character after my Tempest's Prospero (though, not surprisingly, things didn't turn out well for him!). I'm like the star to every wandering bark, the arrow of every compass, the buzzard to every haw ~ Sarah Schmelling

Poor Tony had once had the hubris to fancy he'd had occasion really to shiver, ever, before. But he had never truly really shivered until time's cadences - jagged and cold and smelling oddly of deodorant - entered his body via several openings, cold the way only damp cold is cold (the phrase he'd once had the gall to imagine he understood was the phrase "chilled to the bone"), shard-studded columns of chill entering to fill his bones with ground glass, and he could hear his joints' glassy crunch with every slightest shift of his hunched position, time ambient and in the air and entering and exiting at will, very cold and slow; and the pain of his breath against his teeth. ~ David Foster Wallace

Infinite Jest is an endurance contest. You manage to get through it and you have no choice but to say you like it. Otherwise, you have to deal with the fact that you just wasted weeks of your life, ~ Gabrielle Zevin

I do things like get in a taxi and say, The library, and step on it. ~ David Foster Wallace

(She) says that she's finding it especially hard to take when these earnest ravaged folks at the lectern say they're `Here But For the Grace of God,' except that's not the strange thing she says, because when Gately nods hard and starts to interject about `It was the same for--' and wants to launch into a fairly standard Boston AA agnostic-soothing riff about the `God' in the slogan being just shorthand for a totally subjective and up-to-you `Higher Power' and AA being merely spiritual instead of dogmatically religious, a sort of benign anarchy of subjective spirit, Joelle cuts off his interjection and says that but that her trouble with it is that `But For the Grace of God' is a subjunctive, a counterfactual, she says, and can make sense only when introducing a conditional clause, like e.g. `But For the Grace of God I would have died on Molly Notkin's bathroom floor,' so that an indicative transposition like `I'm here But For the Grace of God' is, she says, literally senseless, and regardless of whether she hears it or not it's meaningless, and that the foamy enthusiasm with which these folks can say what in fact means nothing at all makes her want to put her head in a Radarange at the thought that Substances have brought her to the sort of pass where this is the sort of language she has to have Blind Faith in. ~ David Foster Wallace

That concentrating intently on anything is very hard work. ~ David Foster Wallace

The root of addict in latin is the word addicere, which means religious devotion. It was an attribute of beginning monks. There is an element in the book [Infinite Jest] in which various people are living out something that I think is true, which is that we all worship. We all have a religious impulse. We can choose, to an extent, what we worship, but the myth that we worship nothing and give ourselves away to nothing, simply sets ourselves up to give ourselves away to something different. For instance, pleasure or drugs or the idea of having a lot of money, being able to buy nice stuff. ~ David Foster Wallace

And how rare is it to find someone who shares your tastes? The one real fight they'd ever had was over David Foster Wallace. It was around the time of Wallace's suicide. A.J. had found the reverent tone of the eulogies to be insufferable. The man had written a decent (if indulgent and overlong) novel, a few modestly insightful essays, and not much else. "Infinite Jest is a masterpiece," Harvey had said. "Infinite Jest is an endurance contest. You manage to get through it and you have no choice but to say you like it. Otherwise, you have to deal with the fact that you just wasted weeks of your life," A.J. had countered. "Style, no substance, my friend." Harvey's face had reddened as he leaned over the desk. "You say that about any writer who was born in the same decade as you! ~ Gabrielle Zevin

And then also, again, still, what are those boundaries, if they're not baselines, that contain and direct its infinite expansion inward, that make tennis like chess on the run, beautiful and infinitely dense? The true opponent, the enfolding boundary, is the player himself. Always and only the self out there, on court, to be met, fought, brought to the table to hammer out terms. The competing boy on the net's other side: he is not the foe: he is more the partner in the dance. He is the what is the word excuse or occasion for meeting the self. As you are his occasion. Tennis's beauty's infinite roots are self-competitive. You compete with your own limits to transcend the self in imagination and execution. Disappear inside the game: break through limits: transcend: improve: win. Which is why tennis is an essentially tragic enterprise… You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place. It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again…Mario thinks hard again. He's trying to think of how to articulate something like: But then is battling and vanquishing the self the same as destroying yourself? Is that like saying life is pro-death? … And then but so what's the difference between tennis and suicide, life and death, the game and its own end? ~ David Foster Wallace

I had to face: I had chosen. My choice, this was love. I had chosen I think the way out of the chains of the cage. I needed this woman. Without her to choose over myself, there was only pain and not choosing, rolling drunkenly and making fantasies of death. ~ David Foster Wallace

Everything I've ever let go of has claw marks on it. ~ David Foster Wallace

Infinite Jest is a masterpiece," Harvey had said. "Infinite Jest is an endurance contest. You manage to get through it and you have no choice but to say you like it. Otherwise, you have to deal with the fact that you just wasted weeks of your life," A.J. ~ Gabrielle Zevin

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

There is an ending [to Infinite Jest] as far as I'm concerned. Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an "end" can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame. If no such convergence or projection occured to you, then the book's failed for you. ~ David Foster Wallace

He can't tell if Hal is sad. He is having a harder and harder time reading Hal's mind or whether he's in good spirits. This worries him. He used to be able to sort of pre-verbally know in his stomach generally where Hal was and what he was doing, even if Hal was far away and playing or if Mario was away, and now he can't anymore. Feel it. This worries him and feels like when you've lost something important in a dream and you can't even remember what it was but it's important. Mario loves Hal so much it makes his heart beat hard. He doesn't have to wonder if the difference now is him or his brother because Mario never changes. ~ David Foster Wallace

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow
of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath
borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how
abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at
it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know
not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your
gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment,
that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one
now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen? ~ William Shakespeare

He said she went around with her feelings out in front of her with an arm around the feelings' windpipe and a Glock 9mm. to the feelings' temple like a terrorist with a hostage, daring you to shoot. ~ David Foster Wallace

When you abuse willpower you waste it. There really is not an infinite supply of it at your disposal. There is an infinite supply of it in the universe. ~ Frederick Lenz

Were really trying to make Crisis as accessible as possible, which is extremely difficult to do because it involves so many characters. But, again, you dont need to know all the details. Obviously the mainstays are there Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and heavily focused on. There are a ton of great characters, and a lot happens to them over the course of Infinite Crisis . Some change and evolve, others fall, but it really is about trying to bring everybody on stage. We probably have 90 percent of the DCU showing up, if not more but without losing focus on what the story is. ~ Geoff Johns

Learn to Open Your Heart and mind to the infinite wonder that exists for you in life. ~ Steven Redhead

I think that there is an infinite creative force that generates all consciousness and all matter and we are all connected and if you align yourself with this infinite creative force then you can be positive and you can be beautiful, I don't think its a person or god , I don't believe in any particular doctrine or dogma, only that humanity is connected. ~ Russell Brand

It is no great wonder if in long process of time, while fortune takes her course hither and thither, numerous coincidences should spontaneously occur. If the number and variety of subjects to be wrought upon be infinite, it is all the more easy for fortune, with such an abundance of material, to effect this similarity of results. ~ Plutarch

I hope you find a love like that–one that is all-consuming and powerful that makes you feel like you're going slightly mad. And if you do find that love, embrace it. Hold onto it. When you give yourself over to love like that, your heart will get bruised. It will get battered. But you will also feel invincible and infinite. ~ Jill Santopolo

Clearly understand that the only limitations you will ever have are the limitations you impose upon yourself. You truly do have infinite potential. ~ Bob Proctor

An infinite number of real parts of time, passing in succession, and exhausted one after another, appears so evident a contradiction, that no man, one should think, whose judgement is not corrupted, instead of being improved, by the sciences, would ever be able to admit of it. ~ David Hume

That which reminds us of nature and thus stimulates a feeling for the infinite abundance of life is beautiful. Nature is organic,and therefore the highest beauty is forever vegetative; and the same is true for morality and love. ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

We can conceive of eternity because we cannot conceive of a cessation of time. We can conceive of infinite space because we cannot conceive of so much matter that our imagination will not stand upon the farthest star and see infinite space beyond. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll

I always think of each night as a song. Or each moment as a song. But now I'm seeing we don't live in a single song. We move from song to song, from lyric to lyric, from chord to chord. There is no ending here. It's an infinite playlist. ~ David Levithan

For it is not Histories that I am writing, but Lives; and in the most illustrious deeds there is not always a manifestation of virtue or vice, nay, a slight thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation of character than battles where thousands fall, or the greatest armaments, or sieges of cities. ~ Plutarch

Only a great actor finds the difficulties of the actor's art infinite. ~ Ellen Terry

Better to end this dream before it becomes a nightmare. ~ Rachel Cohn

The world of an animal is reduced to its perimeter. Human world is reduced to its perimeter, but does the world of God have perimeters? If it does then it is not infinite, but if it doesn't, it means that this is not a world. ~ Sorin Cerin

The moonlight rained down on the beach as if to shine a spotlight on my solitude, and I wanted to cry out at it, 'Why did you take her? You, surrounded by all of your twinkling stars and infinite wonders and darkness. There's already enough beauty where you are. ~ Rachael Wade

Awareness has infinite gradations, like light. ~ Ignazio Silone

I'm fighting a losing battle. I can't tell this story the way it should be told. This whole hotchpotch of characters, events, dates, and the infinite branching of cause and effect - and these people, these real people who actually existed. I'm barely able to mention a tiny fragment of their lives, their actions, their thoughts. I keep banging my head against the wall of history. And I look up and see, growing all over it - ever higher and denser, like a creeping ivy - the unmappable pattern of causality. ~ Laurent Binet

Some had rather lose their friend then their Jest. ~ George Herbert

The search of truth and understanding is an infinite adventure. ~ Abhijit Naskar

There is a concept that is the corrupter and destroyer of all others. I speak not of Evil, whose limited empire is that of ethics; I speak of the infinite. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

No," Gus answered immediately. "The needs of the gears are persistent. Without constant lubrication, they will seize. They will not process fuel. Without energy to turn them, the stars will no longer burn in the void. Without the unending warmth of the machine, without the rotation of the gears, the cold and the still will take everything. You do not understand it. You will not accept it. But we fight against entropy. We fight for motion. We fight for the machine. We are bits in that glorious engine, all of us. Even you. Even your friends. There may not be a final goal for us. We do not get the luxury of an end point. There is only maintenance, and our toil is infinite. But the work is good. The gears must turn. No, Carey. There is never enough blood." That ~ Robert Brockway

I'm only a shadow compared to her. When we find her, I'll be her Astia. Together, we'll be perfect balance and infinite power. Together, we'll save the Kupari. ~ Sarah Fine

I have gone from "being" my experience to being infinite consciousness having the experience and observing the experience. ~ David Icke

The vibration of Spirit is at such an infinite rate of intensity and rapidity that it is practically at rest - just as a rapidly moving wheel seems to be motionless. And at the other end of the scale, there are gross forms of matter whose vibrations are so low as to seem at rest. Between these poles, there are millions upon millions of varying degrees of vibration. From corpuscle and electron, atom and molecule, to worlds and universes, everything is in vibratory motion. This is also true on the planes of energy and force (which are but varying degrees of vibration); and also on the mental planes (whose states depend upon vibrations); and even on to the spiritual planes. An understanding of this Principle, with the appropriate formulas, enables Hermetic students to control their own mental vibrations as well as those of others. The Masters also apply this Principle to the conquering of Natural phenomena, in various ways. "He who understands the Principle of Vibration, has grasped the sceptre of Power," says one of the old writers. ~ Three Initiates

Infinite power of the spirit, brought to bear upon matter evolves material development, made to act upon thought evolves intellectuality, and made to act upon itself makes of man a God. First, let us be Gods, and then help other to be GOds. Be and Make. Let this be our motto. ~ Swami Vivekananda

Scattered upon the flimsy dresser scarf were half a dozen hairpins - those discreet, indistinguishable friends of womankind, feminine of gender, infinite of mood and uncommunicative of tense. ~ O. Henry

In order to get over the ethical difficulties presented by the naive naturalism of many parts of those Scriptures, in the divine authority of which he firmly believed, Philo borrowed from the Stoics (who had been in like straits in respect of Greek mythology), that great Excalibur which they had forged with infinite pains and skill - the method of allegorical interpretation. This mighty 'two-handed engine at the door' of the theologian is warranted to make a speedy end of any and every moral or intellectual difficulty, by showing that, taken allegorically or, as it is otherwise said, 'poetically' or, 'in a spiritual sense,' the plainest words mean whatever a pious interpreter desires they should mean. ~ Thomas Henry Huxley

At the end as at the start, and through all the in-betweens, I love you. ~ Amal El-Mohtar

The world of the cinema and of painting are very different; precisely, the possibilities of photography and the cinema reside in that unlimited fantasy which is born of things themselves ... a piece of sugar can become on the screen larger than an infinite perspective of gigantic buildings. ~ Salvador Dali

All things were together, infinite both in number and in smallness; for the small too was infinite. ~ Anaxagoras

Folks around here call us el destinos.
They like to say we came from the stars. And when I stare up at the infinite heavens stretched out above us like a shroud, it's hard to imagine we came from anywhere else. ~ Leslye Walton

Tolstoy is frequently quoted as saying something about how all happy families are the same. but unhappy families are all unhappy in different ways. Of course he's got it totally wrong, completely ass-backward. Happiness is infinite in its variety, and happy people, happy families, can find their joy in so many different ways....
And all the unhappy families are all pretty much the same. All types of misery are identical at the core... ~ Elizabeth Wurtzel

Words are finite expressions of the infinite mind. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

You have no more anger when you are all love, bliss, infinite existence ... ~ Swami Vivekananda

All is finite in the present; and even that finite is infinite in it velocity of flight towards death. But in God there is nothing finite ... Upon a night of earthquake he builds a thousand years of pleasant habitations for man. Upon the sorrow of an infant he raises oftentimes from human intellects glorious vintages that could not else have been. ~ Thomas De Quincey

The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate. Consider, for example, two of them: mere insatiable curiosity and the desire to do good. The latter is put high above the former, and yet it is the former that moves one of the most useful men the human race has yet produced: the scientific investigator. What actually urges him on is not some brummagem idea of Service, but a boundless, almost pathological thirst to penetrate the unknown, to uncover the secret, to find out what has not been found out before. His prototype is not the liberator releasing slaves, the good Samaritan lifting up the fallen, but a dog sniffing tremendously at an infinite series of rat-holes. ~ H.L. Mencken

In the violent scorn of her revolted pride, of her indignant honor, had she forgotten a lowlier yet harder duty left undone?
In her contempt and dread of yielding to mere amorous weakness had she stifled and denied the cry of pity, the cry of conscience?
To suffer woes which hope thinks infinite. To forgive wrongs darker than death or night. To defy power which seems omnipotent. To love and live to hope till hope creates from it's own wreck the thing it contemplates. Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent.
This had been the higher, diviner way which she had missed, this obligation from the passion of the past which she had left unfulfilled, unaccepted.
Now the misgiving arose in her whether she had mistaken arrogance for duty; whether, cleaving so closely to honor she had forgotten the obligation of mercy. ~ Ouida

Mortal man-- shackled as it were in a tabernacle of clay; imprisoned on a single planet that is itself but a speck of dust in an endless universe; bound by time and space, and living for only a few brief moments-- mortal man, a spirit son of God, dwells in the depths of ignorance, away from his Father, without a knowledge of eternal things. We are born, we live, we die, and in the process we are privileged-- some of us-- to receive a few little glimmerings of eternal truth by revelation. And there are few among us, even in sober moments, who ponder the wonders of eternity and seek to know what lies beyond the ken of humankind. What of creation itself, of worlds without number, all inhabited, all crowned with an infinite variety of life? How did Gods begin to be, and whence came the order and system in a universe whose outer limits we shall never see? How little we know of preexistence, both ours and that of all forms of life; or of death and the world of waiting spirits; or of the resurrection which raises sleeping dust to glorious life. What are Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob doing today? How can Moroni hie to Kolob in the twinkling of an eye? Where are Annas and Caiaphas and Pilate, and what kind of a life are they living? How little we know about creation, about redemption, about immortal glory. ~ Bruce R. McConkie

Edward was always a good listener, since his own form of self-expression then consisted in making uneartly and to me quite meaningless sounds on his small violin. I remember him, at the age of seven, as a rather solemn, brown-eyed little boy, with beautiful arched eyebrows which lately, to my infinite satisfaction, have begun to reproduce themselves, a pair of delicate question-marks, above the dark eyes of my five-year-old son. Even in childhood we seldom quarrelled, and by the time that we both went away to boarding-school he had already become the dearest companion of thos brief years of unshadowed adolescence permitted to our condemned generation. ~ Vera Brittain

Before Sutter, native people had heeded the cycle of the seasons, time was infinite, and life's rhythms were unchanging. Now, for at least part of their lives, some Indians were wedded to a concept that proclaimed that time was limited and that it had economic value. The clang of Sutter's bell announced that time was money, that it marched onward, and that it waited for no man, including Indians in the 1840s. ~ Albert L. Hurtado