Say the whole point of love is to try to get your fingers through the holes in the lover's mask. To get some kind of hold on the mask, and who cares how you do it.
David Foster WallaceThe basic idea that the purpose of life is to be happy or is to experience the most favorable ratio of pleasure to suffering or productivity to work or gratification to sacrifice or any of that stuff, which, you know, a couple generations ago, to say that kind of stuff would have made you, you know, a freak - a freak and an Epicurean - and now seems to be so much - simply an unquestioned assumption of the culture that we don't really even talk about it anymore.
David Foster WallaceHe knew what the Beats know and what the great tennis player knows, son: learn to do nothing, with your whole head and body, and everything will be done by what's around you.
David Foster WallaceI had, by thirteen, developed a sort of Taoist hubris about my ability to control via non-control.
David Foster WallaceWhat teachers and the administration in that era never seemed to see was that the mental work of what they called daydreaming often required more effort and concentration than it would have taken simply to listen in class. Laziness is not the issue. It is just not the work dictated by the administration.
David Foster Wallace