Infinite Jest

“

“It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of 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. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately - the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. Flight from exactly what? These rooms blandly filled with excrement and meat? To what purpose? This was 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. It was kind, in a way.”

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“The soul's certainty that the day will have to not be traversed but climbed, vertically, and then going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer”

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“These worst mornings with cold floors and hot windows and merciless light--the soul's certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again off something tall and sheer.”

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“I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it"”

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“And Lo, for the Earth was empty of Form, and void. And Darkness was all over the Face of the Deep. And We said: Look at that fucker Dance”

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“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.”

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“Gately’s after all a fucking drug addict, and a drug addict’s second most meaningful relationship is always with his domestic entertainment unit”