Infinite Jest

Infinite Jest

by

David Foster Wallace

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Chapter 1 Quotes

I believe I appear neutral, maybe even pleasant, though I've been coached to err on the side of neutrality and not attempt what would feel to me like a pleasant expression or smile.

Related Characters: Hal Incandenza (speaker)
Page Number: 3
Explanation and Analysis:

“I'm not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions. Some of them are interesting. I could, if you'd let me, talk and talk. Let's talk about anything. I believe the influence of Kierkegaard on Camus is underestimated. I believe Dennis Gabor may very well have been the Antichrist. I believe Hobbes is just Rousseau in a dark mirror. I believe, with Hegel, that transcendence is absorption. I could interface you guys right under the table,” I say.

Related Characters: Hal Incandenza (speaker)
Page Number: 12
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

“I'm ten for Pete's sake. I think maybe your appointment calendar's squares got juggled. I'm the potentially gifted ten-year-old tennis and lexical prodigy whose mom's a continental mover and shaker in the prescriptive grammar academic world and whose dad's a towering figure in optical and avant-garde film circles and single-handedly founded the Enfield Tennis Academy but drinks Wild Turkey at like 5:00 a.m. and pitches over sideways during dawn drills, on the courts, some days, and some days presents with delusions about people's mouths moving but nothing coming out. I'm not even up to J yet, in the condensed O.E.D., much less Québec or malevolent Lurias.

Related Characters: Hal Incandenza (speaker), Dr. James Incandenza / Jim, Avril Incandenza, Luria P——
Related Symbols: Substances
Page Number: 30
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

A more than averagely devout follower of the North American sufism promulgated in his childhood by Pir Valayat, the medical attaché partakes of neither kif nor distilled spirits, and must unwind without chemical aid… The medical attaché sits and watches and eats and watches, unwinding by visible degrees, until the angles of his body in the chair and his head on his neck indicate that he has passed into sleep, at which point his special electronic recliner can be made automatically to recline to full horizontal, and luxuriant silk-analog bedding emerges flowingly from long slots in the appliance's sides.

Related Characters: Medical Attaché
Related Symbols: Substances
Page Number: 34
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

Hal likes to get high in secret, but a bigger secret is that he's as attached to the secrecy as he is to getting high.

Related Characters: Hal Incandenza
Related Symbols: Substances
Page Number: 49
Explanation and Analysis:

Recreational drugs are more or less traditional at any U.S. secondary school, maybe because of the unprecedented tensions: post-latency and puberty and angst and impending adulthood, etc. To help manage the intrapsychic storms, etc… But so some E.T.A.s - not just Hal Incandenza by any means - are involved with recreational substances, is the point. Like who isn't, at some life-stage, in the U.S.A. and Interdependent regions, in these troubled times, for the most part.

Related Characters: Hal Incandenza
Related Symbols: Substances
Page Number: 52-53
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14 Quotes

Sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them.

Related Characters: Kate Gompert
Page Number: 71
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 18 Quotes

It's no accident they say you Eat, Sleep, Breathe tennis here. These are autonomical. Accretive means accumulating, through sheer mindless repeated motions. The machine-language of the muscles. Until you can do it without thinking about it, play.

Related Characters: Jim Troeltsch (speaker)
Page Number: 117-118
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 31 Quotes

So what is this? You're ordering me to pray? Because I allegedly have a disease? I dismantle my life and career and enter nine months of low-income treatment for a disease, and I'm prescribed prayer?

Related Characters: Pat Montesian
Related Symbols: Substances
Page Number: 180
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 33 Quotes

That a little-mentioned paradox of Substance addiction is: that once you are sufficiently enslaved by a Substance to need to quit the Substance in order to save your life, the enslaving Substance has become so deeply important to you that you will all but lose your mind when it is taken away from you. Or that sometime after your Substance of choice has just been taken away from you in order to save your life, as you hunker down for required a.m. and p.m. prayers, you will find yourself beginning to pray to be allowed literally to lose your mind, to be able to wrap your mind in an old newspaper or something and leave it in an alley to shift for itself, without you.

Related Symbols: Substances
Page Number: 201
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 38 Quotes

Time is passing. Ennet House reeks of passing time. It is the humidity of early sobriety, hanging and palpable. You can hear ticking in clockless rooms here.

Page Number: 279
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 43 Quotes

Sobriety in Boston is regarded as less a gift than a sort of cosmic loan. You can't pay the loan back, but you can pay it forward, by spreading the message that despite all appearances AA works, spreading this message to the next new guy who's tottered in to a meeting and is sitting in the back row unable to hold his cup of coffee. The only way to hang onto sobriety is to give it away, and even just 24 hours of sobriety is worth doing anything for, a sober day being nothing short of a daily miracle if you've got the Disease…

Related Symbols: Substances
Page Number: 344
Explanation and Analysis:

It’s all optional; do it or die.

Page Number: 357
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 45 Quotes

“To be envied, admired, is not a feeling. Nor is fame a feeling. There are feelings associated with fame, but few of them are any more enjoyable than the feelings associated with envy of fame”…

“So I'm stuck in the cage from either side. Fame or tortured envy of fame. There's no way out.”

Related Characters: LaMont Chu (speaker), Lyle (speaker)
Page Number: 389
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 51 Quotes

I couldn't even stand to be in the same room, see him like that. Begging for just even a few seconds - a trailer, a snatch of soundtrack, anything. His eyes wobbling around like some drug-addicted newborn.

Related Characters: Hugh / Helen Steeply (speaker), Rémy Marathe
Related Symbols: The Entertainment, Substances
Page Number: 507
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 65 Quotes

Listen to any sort of sub-16 exchange you hear in the bathroom or food line: 'Hey there, how are you?'' Number eight this week, is how I am. They all still worship the carrot. With the possible exception of the tormented LaMont Chu, they all still subscribe to the delusive idea that the continent's second-ranked fourteen-year-old feels exactly twice as worthwhile as the continent's #4.

Related Characters: LaMont Chu
Page Number: 693
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 69 Quotes

After so long not caring, and then now the caring crashes back in and turns so easily into obsessive worry, in sobriety. A few days before the debacle in which Don Gately got hurt, Joelle had begun to worry obsessively about her teeth. Smoking 'base cocaine eats teeth, corrodes teeth, attacks the enamel directly.

Related Characters: Don Gately, Joelle Van Dyne / Madame Psychosis / Lucille Duquette
Related Symbols: Substances
Page Number: 723
Explanation and Analysis:

Was amateurish the right word? More like the work of a brilliant optician and technician who was an amateur at any kind of real communication. Technically gorgeous, the work, with lighting and angles planned out to the frame. But oddly hollow, empty, no sense of dramatic towardness - no narrative movement toward a real story; no emotional movement toward an audience.

Related Characters: Dr. James Incandenza / Jim, Joelle Van Dyne / Madame Psychosis / Lucille Duquette
Related Symbols: The Entertainment
Page Number: 740
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 74 Quotes

LIFE IS LIKE TENNIS
THOSE WHO SERVE
BEST USUALLY WIN

Page Number: 952
Explanation and Analysis:
No matches.