Infinite Jest - by David Foster Wallace

The doctor’s small nods were designed to appear not as responses but as invitations to continue, what Dretske called Momentumizers.

Steeply used a technical interviewer’s device of pretending to occupy himself with small physical chores of preening and hygiene, delaying, to have Marathe elaborate himself more fully.

The thing about Wayne is he’s all business. His face on court is blankly rigid, with the hypertonic masking of schizophrenics and Zen adepts. He tends to look straight ahead at all times. He is about as reserved as they come. His emotions emerge in terms of velocity. Intelligence as strategic focus. His play, like his manner in general, seems to Schacht less alive than undead. Wayne tends to eat and study alone.

What metro Boston AAs are trite but correct about is that both destiny’s kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person’s basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can’t even hear because you’re in such a rush to or from something important you’ve tried to engineer.

Absolutely not, Mart. No way a downer-association-rife term like refugee is going to be applicable here. I cannot overstress this too assertively. Eminent nondomain: yes. Renewal-grade brand of sacrifice: you bet. Heroes, new era’s breed of new pioneers, striking in bravely for already-settled good old settled but unfoul American territory: bien sûr.

Marathe assumed an expression that lampooned a dullard’s hard thought.

’The thing about people who are truly and malignantly crazy: their real genius is for making the people around them think they themselves are crazy. In military science this is called Psy-Ops, for your info.’

You have to take what Orin says in a fairly high-sodium way.

Defining yourself in opposition to something is still being anaclitic on that thing, isn’t it? I certainly think so. And men who believe they hate what they really fear they need are of limited interest, I find.

Congenital plagiarists put so much more work into camouflaging their plagiarism than it would take just to write up an assignment from conceptual scratch. It usually seems like plagiarists aren’t lazy so much as kind of navigationally insecure. They have trouble navigating without a detailed map’s assurance that somebody has been this way before them. About this incredible painstaking care to hide and camouflage the plagiarism — whether it’s dishonesty or a kind of kleptomaniacal thrill-seeking or what — Hal hasn’t developed much of any sort of take.

He pictured himself having weighty, steeple-fingered conversations with the man.

Gately’s listening in with the uncomprehending close attention of like a child whose parents are discussing something adultly complex about child-care in its presence.