The Greeks were the real inventors of what we call math, because-again-they were the first people to treat numbers and their relations as abstractions rather than as properties of collections of real things.
Almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it.
One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one.
The core accounting equation A = L + E can be dissolved and reshuffled into everything from E = A - L to beyond.
I tossici non hanno relazioni, prendono ostaggi.
The noise of the herd is tornadic, locomotival. The expression on the hamsters' whiskered faces is businesslike and implacable-it's that implacable-herd expression.
Two clocks, two ghosts, one square acre of hidden mirror.
When I was drunk I wanted to get sober and when I was sober I wanted to get drunk,' John L. says; 'I lived that way for years, and I submit to you that's not livin that's a fuckin death-in-life.
Why do prostitutes when they get straight always try and get so prim? It's like long-repressed librarian-ambitions come flooding out.
Seminal. He keeps saying it. Seminal, seminal.
It seems significant that we don't want things to be quiet, ever, anymore.
X secretly castigates himself and wonder where his basic decency and compassion are.
If an art form is marginalized it's because it's not speaking to people.
Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui — these are the true hero's enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real.
The other nice thing about the Pump Room is the way it's connected by tunnel to the prorectors' rows of housing units, which means men's rooms, which means Hal can crawl, hunch, and tiptoe into.
Rap's conscious response to the poverty and oppression of U.S. blacks is like some hideous parody of sixties black pride.
We will, of course, without hesitation use art to parody, ridicule, debunk, or criticize ideologies--but this is very different.
It's hard to get good answers to why Young Voters are so uninterested in politics. This is probably because it's next to impossible to get someone to think hard about why he's not interested in something. The boredom itself preempts inquiry; the fact of the feeling's enough.
I'm just afraid of having a tombstone that says HERE LIES A PROMISING OLD MAN.
Evil people never believe they are evil, but rather that everyone else is evil.
It is named the “Webfor good reason.
I balked at trying antidepressants, I just couldn't see myself taking pills to try to be less of a fraud.
Hal's brooding. Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he's devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It's hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.
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.
In short that 99% of the head's thinking activity consists of trying to scare the everliving shit out of itself.
And then but so what's the difference between tennis and suicide, life and death, the game and its own end?
Madame Psychosis' name was in reality Lucille Duquette, and the Daddy's name either Earl or Al Duquette of extreme southeast KY, way down near TN and VA.
You have wondered perhaps, why all real accountants wear hats? They are today's cowboys.
Disappear inside the game: break through limits: transcend: improve: win.
Genuine pathological openness is about as seductive as Tourette's Syndrome.
She regarded the things that were important to me as her enemy, not realizing that they were, in fact, the me she seemed so jealously to covet.
My worst character flaw that I'm conscious of is that I tend to think my way into circles instead of resolving anything. It's paralyzing and boring for people around me.
We are the Few, the Proud, the More or Less Constantly Appalled at Everyone Else.
Certain sincerely devout and spiritually advanced people believe that the God of their understanding helps them find parking places and gives them advice on Mass. Lottery numbers.
The worst kind of nihilist—the kind who isn't even aware he's a nihilist.
That God might regard the issue of whether you believe there's a God or not as fairly low on his/her/its list of things s/he/it's interested in re you.
Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality—there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand? Here is the truth—actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested.
I'm not afraid of new things. I'm just afraid of feeling alone even when there's somebody else there. I'm afraid of feeling bad. Maybe that's selfish, but it's the way I feel.
Jim's internal life was to Orin a black hole, Orin said, his father's face any room's fifth wall.
There is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.
His eyes were holes in the world.
Infinite Jest (IV) Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Pam Heath (?), 'Madame Psychosis' (?); 78 mm.; 90 minutes(?); color; sound. Unfinished, unseen attempt at completion of Infinite Jest (III) UNRELEASED.
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.
Pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. per se.
People hate people, not freedom.
His parents' pregnancies must have been all-out chromosomatic war.
I am saying in order to masturbate successfully, the scene required rational logic by which copulation with this exercising woman is plausible in the public of the State Exercise Facility. I was responsible to this logic.
Drug addicts driven to crime to finance their drug addiction are not often inclined toward violent crime. Violence requires all different kinds of energy, and most drug addicts like to expend their energy not on their professional crime but on what their professional crime lets them afford. Drug addicts are often burglars, therefore.
With still, underneath, the old respectable-girl-versus-slut thing. It's OK to fuck around if you're a feminist but it's also not OK to fuck around because most guys aren't feminists and won't respect you and won't call you again if you fuck around.
