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Book: Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
Quotes of Book: Consider the Lobster and Other
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  1. David Foster Wallace _ Consider the Lobster and Other

    If a physics textbook operated on Descriptivist principles, the fact that some Americans believe electricity flows better downhill {based on the observed fact that power lines tend to run high above the homes they serve} would require the Electricity Flows Better Downhill Hypothesis to be included as a "valid" theory in the textbook-just as, for Dr. Fries, if some Americans use infer for imply or aspect for perspective, these usages become ipso facto "valid" parts of the language. The truth is that structural linguists like Gove and Fries are not scientists at all; they're pollsters who misconstrue the importance of the "facts" they are recording. It isn't scientific phenomena they're observing and tabulating, but rather a set of human behaviors, and a lot of human behaviors are-to be blunt-moronic. Try, for instance, to imagine an "authoritative" ethics textbook whose principles were based on what most people actually do. Grammar and usage conventions are, as it happens, a lot more like ethical principles than like scientific theories.
    book-quote

  2. David Foster Wallace _ Consider the Lobster and Other

    Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn't enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they're not even very good. The main thing that keeps Krantz and Grisham and a lot of other gifted storytellers from being artistically good is that they don't have any talent for {or interest in} characterization-their compelling plots are inhabited by crude and unconvincing stick figures. {In fairness, there are also writers who are good at making complex and fully realized human characters but don't seem able to insert those characters into a believable and interesting plot. Plus others-often among the academic avant garde-who seem expert/interested in neither plot nor character, whose books' movement and appeal depend entirely on rarefied meta-aesthetic agendas.}
    book-quote

  3. David Foster Wallace _ Consider the Lobster and Other

    Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn't enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they're not even very good.
    book-quotewriting

  4. David Foster Wallace _ Consider the Lobster and Other

    But the young educated adults of the 90s -- who were, of course, the children of the same impassioned infidelities and divorces Mr. Updike wrote about so beautifully -- got to watch all this brave new individualism and self-expression and sexual freedom deteriorate into the joyless and anomic self-indulgence of the Me Generation. Today's sub-40s have different horrors, prominent among which are anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without once having loved something more than yourself.
    book-quotesolipsismnorman-mailerphilip-roth

  5. David Foster Wallace _ Consider the Lobster and Other

    When a solipsist dies ... everything goes with him.
    book-quotejohn-updikesolipsism

  6. David Foster Wallace _ Consider the Lobster and Other

    Al Gore, best described by CNN sound tech Mark A. as "amazingly lifelike"; Steve Forbes, with his wet forehead and loony giggle; G.W. Bush's patrician smirk and mangled cant; even Clinton himself, with his big red fake-friendly face and "I feel your pain." Men who aren't enough like human beings even to hate-what one feels when they loom into view is just an overwhelming lack of interest, the sort of deep disengagement that is often a defense against pain. Against sadness. In fact, the likeliest reason why so many of us care so little about politics is that modern politicians make us sad, hurt us deep down in ways that are hard even to name, much less talk about. It's way easier to roll your eyes and not give a shit. You probably don't want to hear about all this, even.
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