David Foster Wallace: Because I'd like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time instead of having to go back in my head and enjoy them then.
Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy's Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day's work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city's reservoir, he turns to the ...
A brick could replace the eagle as the symbol for the United States of America. And why not? A brick just sort of sits there, expecting everything to be built around it; a brick crumbles, much like an empire; and a brick is nonthinking, just like Ame...
Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpa...
I can't wait for that one girl to come in and kick your feet from under you. You think you have things organized, sorted. [...] When that one girl comes along, I'm going to say I told you so, and give you no bloody sympathy when you've turned into a ...
I had never been this mad at her before. It was one thing to be attacked by someone you hated, but this was something else. This was the kind of hurt that could only be inflicted by someone you loved, who you thought loved you. It was sort of like be...
Words could betray you if you chose the wrong ones, or mean less if you used too many. Jokes could be grandly miscalculated, or stories deemed boring, and I'd learned early on that my sense of humor and ideas about what sorts of things were fascinati...
Her husband and her children did not consider her beyond criticism. She belonged to them; whatever she did affected them; their pride, their good name in the world lay in her hands. They would give her love, protection, even a sort of homage, but in ...
The role of capitalist ideology is not to make an explicit case for something in the way that propaganda does, but to conceal the fact that the operations of capital do not depend on any sort of subjectively assumed belief. It is impossible to concei...
Gwen Stefani has amazing style. I used to really love Courtney Love, and anything she wore I loved. Or Chloe Sevigny, because I really love that sort of classic look, and I like being girly and flowery, and wearing little D&G dresses. I wear hats a l...
Griff had never been the fanciful sort, even as a boy. When he was with Pauline, the world different. She forced him to see things through fresh eyes. Suddenly his library was the eighth wonder of the world, and Corinthian columns merited blasphemy. ...
I'm sorry, but I do hate this differentiation between the sexes. 'The modern girl has a thoroughly businesslike attitude to life' That sort of thing. It's not a bit true! Some girls are businesslike and some aren't. Some men are sentimental and muddl...
Dear Reader, This book you hold is a treasure, of sorts, as is every book I have ever known. I have made it for you – especially you – for reasons you will understand as my words unfurl before your eyes. Turn these pages tenderly. You hold my lif...
They were sorting, or classifying. It's easy-anyone dressed funny is the enemy, especially if they reject your supremacy or do not acknowledge school as entertainment. If the enemy tries to look like you and act like you, only in more affordable clot...
I don't know what sort of world she will live in and I have no fixed opinions concerning how she should live in it. I only know that if she does not come to value what is true above what is useful, it will make little difference whether she lives at ...
All I want is' - and he uttered the final words through clenched teeth and with a sort of shame - 'to retain my freedom.' I should myself have thought,' said Jacques, 'that freedom consisted in frankly confronting situations into which one had delibe...
(from the short story The Honorary Shepherds)...you can't be kicked out of a faith. Faith starts inside your heart and ends up in eternity. All you can be kicked out of is a building, which is the bus stop of faith, sort of, and what's a building?
People don't want to think. And the deeper they get into trouble, the less they want to think. But by some sort of instinct, they feel that they ought to and it makes them feel guilty. So they'll bless and follow anyone who gives them a justification...
There were more recent markings as well-initials scratched over the pictographs, some with dates. people were always wanting to announce their existence to the world in a way that would surpass the ages, creating some sort of immortality. For all Kar...
Mary Farquhar, who always flirts with her own husband across the dinner-table. That is not very pleasant. Indeed, it is not even decent . . . and that sort of thing is enormously on the increase. The amount of women in London who flirt with their own...
Those who remarked in the countenance of this young hero a dissolute audacity mingled with extreme haughtiness ... could not yet deny to his countenance that sort of comeliness which belongs to an open set of features, well formed by nature, modeled ...
