Starting at Gilgamesh and reading forward, I find no evidence that consciousness has ever been a comfortable experience.

—Marilynne Robinson

A similar sort of effect can be seen in the work of Wallace’s great idol, Don DeLillo, a writer who shares with Wallace the rare distinction of living into a world that he helped invent. One imagines that, like DeLillo’s post-9/11 writing, Wallace’s post-Infinite Jest works would have been of considerable merit, but without a certain vitality that characterized the works that helped create the world in which he lives.

—Scott Espositio

(Source: quarterlyconversation.com)

fucking awesome

Had anyone chosen to ponder further, he or she might have wondered at the strange symmetry of the two men’s settings—pinioned as each was among great stacks of books, single-mindedly devoted to learning of the most recondite kind, each man’s only outlet his correspondence, in great daily storms of paper and floods of ink.

Except there was a difference: William Minor remained profoundly and irreversibly mad.

—Simon Winchester, The Professor and the Madman