Infinite Jest

You have to love old-fashioned men’s rooms: the citrus scent of deodorant disks in the long porcelain trough; the stalls with wooden doors in frames of cool marble; these thin sinks in rows, basins supported by rickety alphabets of exposed plumbing; mirrors over metal shelves; behind all the voices the slight sound of a ceaseless trickle, inflated

I believe the influence of Kierkegaard on Camus is underestimated.

I can picture deLint and White sitting with their elbows on their knees in the defecatory posture of all athletes at rest, deLint staring at his huge thumbs, while C.T. in the reception area paces in a tight ellipse, speaking into his portable phone.

My silent response to the expectant silence begins to affect the air of the room, the bits of dust and sportcoat-lint stirred around by the AC’s vents dancing jaggedly in the slanted plane of windowlight, the air over the table like the sparkling space just above a fresh-poured seltzer.

Wallace spelunked the OED and fearlessly neologized, nouning verbs, verbing nouns, creating less a novel of language than a brand-new lexicographical reality.

It took him gallons of viscous time

It’s like his shoulder’s grown its own testicles and every time his heart beats some very small guy kicked him in them, the testicles.

The raw healthy sexuality of the whole thing just about makes Gately sick with longing and self-pity,

A weird isolated memory of summertime gnats knitting the air above the shaggy animal-head of a neighbor’s topiary hedge.