Infinite jest Quotes

“Alas poor Yorick! I knew him Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest of most excellent fancy.”

“It now lately sometimes seemed a black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe.”

“LaMont, the truth is that the world is incredibly, incredibly, unbelievably old. You suffer with the stunted desire caused by one of its oldest lies. Do not believe the photographs. Fame is not the exit from any cage.”

“Doctors tend to enter the arenas of their profession's practice with a brisk good cheer that they have to then stop and try to mute a bit when the arena they're entering is a hospital's fifth floor, a psych ward, where brisk good cheer would amount to a kind of gloating. This is why doctors on psych wards so often wear a vaguely fake frown of puzzled concentration, if and when you see them in fifth-floor halls. And this is why a hospital M.D.--who's usually hale and pink-cheeked and poreless, and who almost always smells unusually clean and good--approaches any psych patient under this care with a professional manner somewhere between bland and deep, a distant but sincere concern that's divided evenly between the patient's subjective discomfort and the hard facts of the case.”

“This appetite to choose death by pleasure if it is available to choose - this appetite of your people unable to choose appetites, this is the death.”

“His parents’ pregnancies must have been all-out chromosomatic war”

“It's no accident that in a bureaucracy getting fired is called 'termination,' as in ontological erasure.”

“It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.”

“Be on guard. The road widens, and many of the detours are seductive.”