Infinite Jest Wiki Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

That concentrating intently on anything is very hard work. ~ 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(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

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

[The entire text of Infinite Jest.] ~ 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

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

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

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 finite human being shall never know in its fullness Truth and Love which is itself infinite. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Speed. O jest unseen, inscrutable, invisible,
As a nose on a man's face, or a weathercock on a steeple!
My master sues to her, and she hath taught her suitor,
He being her pupil, to become her tutor.
O excellent device! was there ever heard a better,
That my master, being scribe, to himself should write the letter?
Valentine. How now, sir? what are you reasoning with yourself?
Speed. Nay, I was rhyming: 'tis you that have the reason. ~ William Shakespeare

Again, the "distance" between being and nonbeing is qualitatively infinite, and so it is immaterial here how small, simple, vacuous, or impalpably indeterminate a physical state or event is: it is still infinitely removed from non-being and infinitely incapable of having created itself out of nothing. ~ David Bentley Hart

Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and be just toward them. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

All abuse is damaging and harmful, even if it took place once or infinite times. ~ Patricia Dsouza

From infinite awareness, something comes forward, a sense of infinite awareness and finite awareness. That perception is the birth of a being. ~ Frederick Lenz

Regardless of the name a person uses for the Infinite Force that holds us together, it is the source of our miraculous, unpredictable creativity and our dignity. ~ Ashok Gangadean

During that summer Nekhludoff experienced that exaltation which youth comes to know not by the teaching of others, but when it naturally begins to recognize the beauty and importance of life, and man's serious place in it; when it sees the possibility of infinite perfection of which the world is capable, and devotes itself to that endeavor, not only with the hope, but with a full conviction of reaching that perfection which it imagines possible. ~ Leo Tolstoy

The wood-carver can fashion whatever he will. Yet his products are but toys of the moment, to be glanced at in jest, not fashioned according to any precept or law. When times change, the carver too will change his style and make new trifles to hit the fancy of the passing day. But there is another kind of artist, who sets more soberly about his work, striving to give real beauty to the things which men actually use and to give to them the shape which tradition has ordained. This maker of real things must not for a moment be confused with the maker of idle toys. ~ Murasaki Shikibu

Madness it is to hope that human minds
can ever understand the Infinite
that comprehends Three Persons in One Being.
Be satisfied with quia unexplained,
O Human race! If you knew everything,
no need for Mary to have borne a son. ~ Dante Alighieri

Now and then there are readings that make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end and tremble, when every word burns and shines hard and clear and infinite and exact, like stones of fire, like points of stars in the dark - readings when the knowledge that we shall know the writing differently or better or satisfactorily, runs ahead of any capacity to say what we know, or how. In these readings, a sense that the text has appeared to be wholly new, never before seen, is followed, almost immediately, by the sense that it was always there, that we the readers, knew it was always there, and have always known it was as it was, though we have now for the first time recognised, become fully cognisant of, our knowledge. ~ A.S. Byatt

Is that . . . has it all been for that? The tea party, the letters, what you said at the festival . . . all of it, no more than an attempt to steal my heart so you could take it back to your queen?'
'The easiest way to steal something,' Jest murmured, 'is for it to be given willingly. ~ Marissa Meyer

In one way, what I saw in those mirrors was the self trapped inside the self, forever.

But in another way, the self in the mirror was opening out, in an infinite unfurling.

I am the one whose drive is being thwarted.

And I am the one who is thwarting it. ~ Alison Bechdel

Some people are like singularities. Get close enough and you will be uncontrollably consumed in an infinite attraction and will cease to exist apart from them. ~ J.S.B. Morse

The strategy of finite players is to kill a state by killing the people who invented it. Infinite players, however, understanding war to be a conflict between states, conclude that states can have only states as enemies; they cannot have persons as enemies. "Sometimes it is possible to kill a state without killing a single one of its members; and war gives no right which is not necessary to the gaining of its object" (Rousseau). For infinite players, if it is possible to wage a war without killing a single person, then it is possible to wage war only without killing a single person. ~ James P. Carse

The world of imagination is the world of eternity. ~ William Blake