Infinite Jest
Quotes from the Book
Language is a piss poor attempt at telepathy is what it is. We try to put our thoughts into each other's heads through language...But half the intended meaning gets lost in the transmission, and the other half is filtered through existing assumptions. Everything is a half truth! That's the whole problem! You can't understand me through the smog of your presumptions and prejudices. Multiply that six billion times and you'll begin to understand the desperation of our global situation
We're like snowflakes. Each of us is unique, but it's still pretty hard to tell us apart.
So, whenever you find yourself putting forth great effort without success, you're trying to force something that won't fit under the circumstances. That's a destructive waste of time. And if that isn't enough to keep in mind, your techniques must always be allowed to evolve and change, in relationships, in life, in science, in society. Otherwise you stagnate, and you won't get anywhere in the long run... You know what the philosopher Aldous Huxley said? He said 'Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.
He was unmistakably sipping iced tea with the hatters and the hares.
Thus was their relationship born on the swift kiss of a pun. Neither suspected what the other would become to each of them. Like phrases running wild in the Logos, they knew neither who nor by what mechanism nor for what reason they were whistled for (if they understood that they were whistled for at all). They were simply compelled to come together. Sophia was the question, and Blip was the answer. And vice versa.
Things take care of themselves as long as you trust and don't try to control too much. Things will happen. Things tend to occur. Why resist what's inevitable? That's like swimming against the current, salmon notwithstanding. Go with the flow, you know? Glide with the glow, man. It's easier.
How can you spend your days just damning people? Man, where do you think we are right now? Not just right here, but here, alive on this planet? This is hell, Brother, look around. It doesn’t have to be, but we make it so. I can even prove it. All life on this planet is carbon-based, right? Do you know what the atomic number of carbon is? Six. That means six electrons, six neutrons, and six protons, 666, the mark of the beast is the illusion of matter! Who was cast out of paradise? Lucifer, right? Well, guess who else was kicked out? We were, Adam and Eve, eating the forbidden fruit, the Tree of Knowledge, driven from the garden like varmints. We’re the beast. DNA is the coil of the serpent. Duh. Hell is separation from the Source, man. Dig?” “Right on,” Manny spoke up. “I can dig that.
Boredom is the coward’s reaction to staring at a wall.
But sense or nonsense, that which motivates the plane of language cannot be resisted any more than that which motivates the plane of life.
But first, these past months in my hermitage I’ve figured out a few things concerning matters metaphysical. As I began to explain earlier, loneliness is nothingness. And as already mentioned, the Hebrew word for God, Yahweh, is simply a form of that most fundamental verb, to be. God is what is, understand, but God cannot be without being perceived. God is all that is, and yet God is nothing unless God can look upon God. God is one, but God is not lonely. Loneliness is a contradiction of Creation. Creation must be, but God did not create the universe. God is the universe. God is not the Creator. God is Creation. There is no difference. There was never anything but Creation, and there will never be anything but Creation. Creation requires nothing but itself for its own existence.
The major difference between children and adults is that adults have forgotten that they’re just pretending.
It is as if he nurses a tapeworm at the core of his soul that leaves him in perpetual need of more attention.
Accomplishments are wastes of time. Dogs accomplish nothing. They have no ambition, for ambition only makes a virtue out of perpetual dissatisfaction. Dogs may chase their tail, but they give it up quickly enough and move on to other curiosities. Perhaps they recognize its futility and inherent limitations, or maybe they become bored with focusing all their energy on just one thing when there is so much else to do and see. They may be on to something. We modern humans live impatient lives chasing our dreams instead of living them, chasing the tail end of our lives, chasing the end of our tragic tale, ever eager for the future and our own demise.
About Tony Vigorito
About the book
"Just a Couple of Days may be the most unusual, the most original novel I have ever read." —TOM ROBBINS
"A lyrical, thoughtful, viral meme of a book. Read it!" —CHRISTOPHER MOORE
Join cult favorite Tony Vigorito in his award-winning underground hit chronicling the party at the end of time. A mischievous artist kicks off a game of graffiti tag on a local overpass by painting the simple phrase, “Uh-oh.” An anonymous interlocutor writes back: “When?” Someone slyly answers: “Just a couple of days.” But what happens in just a couple of days? Professor Blip Korterly is arrested, his friend Dr. Flake Fountain is drafted into a shadow-government research project to develop the ultimate biological weapon, and an accidental outbreak turns into a merry-hearted, babble-inducing apocalypse that will either destroy humankind or take it to the next step in evolution.
"Just a Couple of Days. F
Book details
- First published
- 2001
- Author
- Tony Vigorito
- Genre
- Fiction
- Goodreads rating
- 3.64 (3k ratings)
Keep reading
Infinite Jest
The Pale King
A Single Man
The Magic Mountain
The Gum Thief
Villa Incognito
Roadside Picnic
The Stone Gods
Stranger in a Strange Land
Under the Net
Sexus
The Gone-Away World
The Fall
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
Blindsight
Point Counter Point
Stories of Your Life and Others
The Fifth Science
Oblivion
Point Omega
The Gay Science
That Hideous Strength
Children of the Mind
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
Skinny Legs and All
The Adolescent
Xenocide
The Man Without Qualities
Foucault's Pendulum
All the Birds in the Sky
Asymmetry
Cat's Cradle
A Language Older Than Words
American Pastoral
The Man in the High Castle
Shadow of the Hegemon
The Golden Notebook
Diary of a Drug Fiend
Life, the Universe and Everything
The Magus
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
Oryx and Crake
Flights
Eyeless in Gaza
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Eating the Dinosaur
Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
The Shape of Water
The Fountainhead
By Nightfall
Nod
V.
Senlin Ascends
The Nix
The Star Diaries
A Wild Sheep Chase
Arm of the Sphinx
The Humans
No One Writes Back
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

