The boy, who did everything well and with a natural unslumped grace the wraith himself had always lacked, and whom the wraith had been so terribly eager to see and hear and let him (the son) know he was seen and heard, the son had become a steadily more and more hidden boy, toward the wraith's life's end; and no one else in the wraith and the boy's nuclear family would see or acknowledge this, the fact that the graceful and marvelous boy was disappearing, right before their eyes. They looked but did not see his invisibility.
David Foster WallaceThe way I think about things and experience things is not particularly linear, and it's not orderly, and it's not pyramidical, and there are a lot of loops.
David Foster WallaceAnd make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit "I donโt really mean what Iโm saying." So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That itโs impossible to mean what you say? That maybe itโs too bad itโs impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, todayโs irony ends up saying: "How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.
David Foster WallaceFor me, boviscopophobia is an even stronger motive than semi-agoraphobia for staying on the ship when we're in port.
David Foster Wallace