Quotes from book
Infinite Jest

Infinite Jest

David Foster Wallace

Infinite Jest is a 1996 novel by American writer David Foster Wallace. The novel is widely noted for its unconventional narrative structure and its experimental use of endnotes . It has been categorized as an encyclopedic novel and made TIME magazine's list of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005.Infinite Jest is regarded as a literary bestseller, having sold 44,000 hardcover copies in its first year of publication. It has since exceeded a million copies in worldwide sales.

“He suddenly felt nothing, or rather Nothing, a pre-tornadic stillness of zero sensation, as if he were the very space he occupied.”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

“Why not? Why not? Why not not, then, if the best reasoning you can contrive is why not?”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

“… most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking.”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

“God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I’m not crazy about.”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

“I don't want to hurt myself. I want to stop hurting.”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

“What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human […] is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

“American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

“I am not what you see and hear.”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

“… loneliness is not a function of solitude.”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

“And when he came to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out.”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

“The sun like a sneaky keyhole view of hell.”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Variant: That everyone is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else. That this isn't necessarily perverse.
Source: Infinite Jest (1996)

“So yo then man what's your story?”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

“You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice.”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

“Te Occidere Possunt Sed Te Edere Non Possunt Nefas Est" ("They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier").”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

“I'm just afraid of having a tombstone that says HERE LIES A PROMISING OLD MAN.”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

“I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I'm not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I…”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

“'So then at forty-six years of age I came here to learn to live by cliches,' is what Day says to Charlotte Treat right after Randy Lenz asked what time it was, again, at 0825. 'To turn my will and life over to the care of cliches. One day at a time. Easy does it. First things first. Courage is fear that has said its prayers. Ask for help. Thy will not mine be done. It works if you work it. Grow or go. Keep coming back.' […] I walk around with my arms out straight in front of me and recite these cliches. In a monotone. No inflection necessary. Could that be one? Could that be added to the cliche-pool? "No inflection necessary"? Too many syllables, probably.'”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Infinite Jest (1996)

“Molly Notkin often confides on the phone to Joelle van Dyne about the one tormented love of Notkin's life thus far, an erotically circumscribed G. W. Pabst scholar at New York University tortured by the neurotic conviction that there are only a finite number of erections possible in the world at any one time and that his tumescence means e. g. the detumescence of some perhaps more deserving or tortured Third World sorghum farmer or something, so that whenever he tumifies he'll suffer the same order of guilt that your less eccentrically tortured Ph. D.-type person will suffer at the idea of, say, wearing baby-seal fur. Molly still takes the high-speed rail down to visit him every couple of weeks, to be there for him in case by some selfish mischance he happens to harden, prompting black waves of self-disgust and an extreme neediness for understanding and nonjudgmental love.”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Infinite Jest (1996)

“You know what your problem is, Hallie?' 'I have just one problem?”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Infinite Jest (1996)

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