904 Quotes by David Foster Wallace

But what G. Cantor posits as the defining formal property of an infinite set is that such a set can be put in a 1-1C with at least one of its proper subsets. Which is to say that an infinite set can have the same cardinal number as its proper subset, as in Galileo’s infinite set of all positive integers and that set’s proper subset of all perfect squares, which latter is itself an infinite set.

The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I’ll hush.

Some days you can almost see Hal like flit in and out of a match, like some part of him leaves and hovers and then comes back.

PS: Allston rules!

Cornell University Press announced plans for a festschrift.

The thing about people who are truly and malignantly crazy: their real genius is for making the people around them think they themselves are crazy.

A question, doctor,” he said. “Why doesn’t the coyote take the money he spends on bird costumes and catapults and radioactive road runner food pellets and explosive missiles and simply go eat Chinese?” He smiled coolly. “Why doesn’t the coyote simply go eat Chinese food?

For some reason I was reluctant to ask anybody what had happened. I hate being the person who always doesn’t know what’s going on and has to ask somebody; it always seems like everybody else knows what’s going on. This is a clear low-status marker, and I resisted it.

I am coming to see that the sensation of the worst nightmares, a sensation that can be felt asleep or awake, is identical to those worst dreams’ form itself: the sudden intra-dream realization that the nightmares’ very essence and center has been with you all along, even awake: it’s just been... overlooked; and then that horrific interval between realizing what you’ve overlooked and turning your head to look back at what’s been right there all along, the whole time...