Infinite Jest

thing that will outlast him and you and me, but will help future people understand us — how we felt, how we lived, what we gave to each other and why.

He has this way of looking warily to either side of him before he says anything.

Everyone should get at least one good look at the eyes of a man who finds himself rising toward what he wants to pull down to himself.

‘Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic, and a dyslexic.’ ‘I give.’ ‘You get somebody who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there’s a dog.’

The true opponent, the enfolding boundary, is the player himself.

Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever. Use it or lose it, he’d say over the newspaper.

learn to do nothing, with your whole head and body, and everything will be done by what’s around you.

Always and only the self out there, on court, to be met, fought, brought to the table to hammer out terms.

And who could not love that special and leonine roar of a public toilet?