The entire ball game, in terms of both the exam and life, was what you gave attention to vs. what you willed yourself to not.

America, as everybody knows, is a country of many contradictions, and a big contradiction for a long time has been between a very aggressive form of capitalism and consumerism against what might be called a kind of moral or civic impulse.

Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty.

....there is an ending [to Infinite Jest] as far as I'm concerned. Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an "end" can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame. If no such convergence or projection occured to you, then the book's failed for you.

There are very few innocent sentences in writing.

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

Please learn the pragmatics of expressing fear: sometimes words that seem to express really invoke. This can be tricky.