
The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

The one who’d asked had a sideburn and the invulnerable smile of someone who’s had two airport cocktails and nothing but nuts.
David Foster Wallace • The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel
This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows28 it’s about something else, way down.
David Foster Wallace • The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel
and was titled How to Make People Like You: An Instant Recipe for Career Success, and in essence I was ‘reading’ the book only to place certain tart, mordant margin-comments next to each bromide, cliché, or cloying bit of inauthentic pap, which meant just about every ¶.
David Foster Wallace • The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel
Sylvanshine could almost literally see the small pink man drinking Pepto-Bismol straight out of the bottle and going home to a woman who treated him like an uninteresting stranger.
David Foster Wallace • The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel
The bus had a lavatory in the wayback rear, which no one ever made any attempt to use, and I remember consciously deciding to trust that the passengers had good reason for not using it instead of venturing in and discovering that reason for myself. Empiricism has its limits.
David Foster Wallace • The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel
It was eerie and discomfiting to see something with hardly any bona fide human face yet to speak of nevertheless assume a fierce, intimidating, almost accusatory expression. For my own part, I had abandoned all ideas of ingratiating myself with Mr. Manshardt through his infant quite early on. To be honest, I was concerned that Gary Manshardt might
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(Here being a veritable law of bureaucratic administration, it turned out: The more compassionate and effective the high-level official, the more unpleasant and Cerberusian the secretary who barred one’s access to him.)
David Foster Wallace • The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel
The girl in cotton bodice and her jeans gone fugitive at the knees.
David Foster Wallace • The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel
Mrs. Sloper, who on this first day gave me the exact same look of incurious distaste I would receive from her for the next thirteen months, and wore (this I sure remember) a lavenderish pantsuit against which the abundant rouge and kohl were even more ghastly. She was maybe fifty, and very thin and tendony, and had the same asymmetrical beehive coi
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