TERRITORI PERICOLOSI

Senza rendersene conto, giacché in quel periodo non permise ad alcunché di interferire con il suo entusiasmo creativo, venne via via approssimandosi a territori pericolosi: puntava verso quello stile sordo alla moda compreso fra l'astratto e il figurativo; fra decorazione e totale assenza di coordinate descrittive. Stava per diventare invendibile.
(Jonathan Coe | La Famiglia Winshaw)

TELEVISIONE, TELEVISIONE

"Oh sì, adesso è a questo che puntano. Non gli basta essere ricchi da far schifo, mettere le mani su uno dei posti di maggior potere in televisione e avere due milioni di lettori che ogni settimana tirano fuori moneta sonante per scoprire che hanno il battiscopa tarlato: questa è gente che vuole - e cazzo se la vuole - l'immortalità! Vogliono che i loro nomi figurino nel catalogo della British Library, vogliono le loro sei copie omaggio, vogliono poter inserire il bel volume rilegato tra Shakespeare e Tolstoj nella libreria del salotto. E ci stanno riuscendo. Ci stanno riuscendo perchè gente come me sa fin troppo bene che, anche qualora trovasse un nuovo Dostoevskij, non venderebbe metà delle copie che realizzerebbe una merdata qualsiasi scritta da un coglione qualsiasi che legge le previsioni del tempo alla televisione, televisione del cazzo!"
(Jonathan Coe | La Famiglia Winshaw)

QUESTA PIEGA

Non ricordo quanto rimase, o di cosa parlammo, ma so che mi piacque questa insolita pratica di eloquenza, e che dovette protrarsi per un bel po', per diversi bicchieri svuotati e riempiti di nuovo, prima che cominciassi a stancarmi e a non sentirmi più a mio agio. Non so come mai, inevitabilmente, la cosa finì per prendere questa piega: io, in realtà mi stavo divertendo. Eppure il desiderio di rimanere solo con me stesso si palesò con repentina intensità.
(Jonathan Coe | La Famiglia Winshaw)

CAPITAL-T TRUTH

None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death. It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over: "This is water. This is water."
(David Foster Wallace | This Is Water)

DEFAULT SETTINGS

If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.
(David Foster Wallace | This Is Water)

DEFAULT SETTING

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.
(David Foter Wallace | This Is Water)

HUMAN POTENTIAL

He says We can't live like this, child. A whole nation has lost the cool side of the pillow. First thing every morning I taste in my mouth the human potential for evil.
(David Foster Wallace | Crash Of '69)

PRETTY GIRLS, STUPID THINGS

So I said, "Excuse me, did you know your shirt was on inside out?" And the person, who was May, turned around and said, "Yes I know that." When she turned I could not help noticing that she was unfortunately very pretty. I hadn't seen that this was a pretty girl, here, or else I almost certainly wouldn't have said anything whatsoever. I have always tried to avoid talking to pretty girls, because pretty girls have a vicious effect on me in which every part of my brain is shut down except for the part that says unbelievably stupid things and the part that is aware that I'm saying unbelievably stupid things.
(David Foster Wallace | The Planet Trillaphon As It Stands In Relation To The Bad Thing)

THE TRIP

If someone tells about a trip he's taken, you expect at least some explanations of why he left on trip in the first place. With this in mind perhaps I'll tell some things about why things weren't too good for me on Earth for quite a while.
(David Foster Wallace | The Planet Trillaphon As It Stands In Relation To The Bad Thing)

GOOD OLD EARTH

I've been on antidepressants for, what, about a year now, and I suppose I feel as if I'm pretty qualified to tell what they're like. They're fine, really, but they're fine in the same way that, say, living on another planet that was warm and comfortable and had food and fresh water would be fine: it would be fine, but it wouldn't be good old Earth, obviously. I haven't been on Earth now for almost a year, because I wasn't doing very well on Earth.
(David Foster Wallace | The Planet Trillaphon As It Stands In Relation To The Bad Thing)

MEMBERS

[...] I've acquired another paperback copy of Ralph Warden Meeker's Obsitinate Dust. Though it's hardly easy going, I'm doing my best to push through to the finish line [...]. Once in a while on the underground trains I look up and see another rider with a copy of Meeker's bulky masterpiece in his hands, and we share a sly collegial smile, like fellow members of some terrorist cell.
(Jonathan Lethem | Chronic City)

THE ISLAND

So I'd exiled myself from society, shunning that artificial island. It made me who I was, the act of not going there. [...] Somehow I was patient enough to have another island in mind for me.
(Jonathan Lethem | Chronic City)

I-T

Now that we were safely out of hospitals and jail cells and subterranean trains I could admire the night's supreme reduced stillness, the storm now just dotting the i's and crossing the t's of its masterpiece.
(Jonathan Lethem | Chronic City)

TRASH THE ORIGINAL

"Each memory is only a photocopy of the previous, rather than referring back to some stored 'original'. We trash the original, like some theatrical troupe that always tears up its script and bases their performance on a transcript of the night before, complete with mistakes and improvs, then destroys that script too, and so on. [...]"
(Jonathan Lethem | Chronic City)

MMM

I mix my metaphors so I know I'm alive. I mix metaphors, I fall down, no problem.
(Jonathan Lethem | Chronic City)

FIRST

[...] Oona, my idea of first thing in the morning.
(Jonathan Lethem | Chronic City)

GOOD?

The good times are killing me.
(Modest Mouse | Good News For People Who Loves Bad News)

SANTA TERRA

As is, come to think of it, terra! But we believe in mythical things, here, like Earth and Santa. After all, we have invisible enemies - CO2, cancer, gravity. So heck, why not invisible friends?
(Jonathan Lethem | Chronic City)

OH MY LEAR

Sure, sure, I was always mistaken. To be so was my great role, my Lear.
(Jonathan Lethem | Chronic City)

YEARS

Years were all she had.
(Jonathan Lethem | Chronic City)

RESOLUTELY

The invisible are always so resolutely invisible, until you see them.
(Jonathan Lethem | Chronic City)

TAD MELANCHOLY

Then came the weird pervasive chocolate smell that floated like a cloud over Manhattan. At first you thought it was local, you'd passed an unseen backery, smelled something wafting, chocolate sweet, stirring cravings and memories both. You'd scan the area, find nothing, continue on, but the smell was with you everywhere, with you in your apartament, too, though the windows were tight. On the street again, you'd see others glancing up, sniffing air, bemused. And soon confirming: yes, they smelled the same thing. It had been downtown, too, someone said, quite nervously. Another said even in the subway. Lexington Avenue sidewalks, normally muffled in regular hostility, broke out suddenly in Willy Wonka comparisons, one passerby saiyng, I thought of a sundae, another replying, No, syrup on crepes. Or, a tad melancholy: I haven't wanted ice cream like this in forty years.
(Jonathan Lethem | Chronic City)

TRIMMED

If I'm ever trimmed so precisely around the curve of my ear let me die in my sleep. Let the eagles pluck out my eyes.
(Jonathan Lethem | Chronic City)

VACUUM

Probably everyone feels this way. My distinction (if there is one) lies in the helpless and immersive extent of my empathy. I'm truly a vacuum filled by the folks I'm with, and vapidly neutral in their absence.
(Jonathan Lethem | Chronic City)

OONA/NO ONE

I wanted Oona in the morning. I could still conjure her slippery smoothness in my arms (and divergent cuppable breasts in my palms, where they left ghost trails of peach's weight), but Oona had kept dunning lights and pulling courtains, and dressing and undressing stealthly, while I was at the sink or refrigerator, or asleep. When I asked, Oona informed me she was too skinny to look at. She might even be invisible, she joked. After I looked clear through her I'd see there was no one there at all.
(Jonathan Lethem | Chronic City)