David Foster Wallace

The crowd slowly dissolved as news from doctors and Service upstairs failed to forthcome.

Uncle Charles, a truly unparalleled slinger of shit, is laying down an enfilade of same, trying to mollify men who seem way more in need of a good brow-mopping than I.

The same Aubrey deLint I'd dismissed for years as a 2-D martinet knelt gurneyside to squeeze my restrained hand and say ‘Just hang in there, Buckaroo,’ […]

The closer it comes to becoming concrete the more abstract it seems. Things get very abstract. The concrete room was the sum of abstract facts. Are facts abstract, or are they just abstract representations of concrete things?

‘That you could dare to imagine we’d fail conversationally to countenance certain weekly shall we say maternal … assignations with a certain unnamed bisexual bassoonist in the Albertan Secret Guard’s tactical-bands unit?’

[…] then hung around the special Silver-Key-Members’ Lounge with the other ladies […] smoking kif and making extremely delicate and oblique fun of their husbands’ sexual idiosyncrasies, […]

Connors was addicted to this racquet and kept using it even after Wilson stopped making it, forfeiting millions in potential endorsement money by doing so. Connors was eccentric (and kind of repulsive) in lots of other ways, too, none of which are germane to this article.

Traveling at sea for the first time is a chance to realize that the ocean is not one ocean. The water changes. The Atlantic that seethes off the eastern U.S. is glaucous and lightless and looks mean. Around Jamaica, though, it’s more like a milky aquamarine, and translucent.

[…] watching you, the waiters, not quite making eye-contact but scanning for any little way to be of service, plus plum-jacketed sommeliers walking around to see if you need a non-buffet libation…