When we are present to what is, we are right front with the expansion of time, but when we make a mistake and get frozen in what was, a layer of detachment builds. Time goes on and we stop. Suddenly we are living, playing chess, crossing the street with our eyes closed in memory.

…..

I think a life of ambition is like existing on a balance beam. As a child, there is no fear, no sense for the danger of falling. The beam feels wide and stable, and natural playfulness allows for creative leaps and fast learning. You can run around doing somersaults and flips, always testing yourself with a love for discovery and new challenges. If you happen to fall off – no problem, you just get back on. But then, as you get older, you become more aware of the risk of injury. You might crack your head or twist your knee. The beam is narrow and you have to stay up there. Plunging off would be humiliating.

(more…)

In the case of a strategic inflection point, the sequence goes more as follows: denial, escape or diversion and, finally, acceptance and pertinent action.

…..

Escape, or diversion, refers to the personal actions for the senior manager. When companies are facing major changes in their core business, they seem to plunge into what seem to be totally unrelated acquisitions and mergers. In my view, a lot these activities are motivated by the need of senior management to occupy themselves respectably with something that clearly and legitimately requires their attention day in and day out, something that they can justify spending their time on and make progress in instead of figuring out how to cope with an impending strategically destructive force.

(more…)

less = singular nouns, time, or money
fewer = plural nouns

less= not as much as
fewer = not as many as

Her husband was lazy, she said, and he was a liar. What’s worse than a lazy liar? Nothing.

-141

There will always be a few details that can’t be explained, and people can end up in jail, and one of those people might be you. But not if this man kills himself. If he kills himself voluntarily, there is no killer to indict. The only perfect homicide is a legitimate suicide.

-143

(more…)

As one’s brain on waking in the morning may hold a shadow of the dream that it experienced in sleep.

…41

was rapidly informed of the full strength of this argument by the dictates of self-interest

…49

He had neither the opportunity to resit nor any intention of doing so.

…74

He soon felt that some light was once again penetrating his brain: all his vague and almost indefinable ideas resumed their place on that marvelous chessboard where perhaps a single extra square is enough to ensure the superiority of men over animals. He was able to think and to strengthen his thoughts by reasoning

…138

Full of hope, he ate a few crumbs of the bread, swallowed some mouthfuls of water and, thanks to the powerful constitution with which nature had endowed him, was more or less restored to himself.

…139

(more…)

It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately – the object seemed incidental to this will to give one-self away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. Flight from exactly what? These rooms blandly filled with excrement and meat? To what purpose? This was why they started us here so young: to give ourselves away before the age when the question why and to what grow real beaks and claws. It was kind, in a way. Modern German is better equipped for combining gerundives and prepositions than its mongrel cousin. The original sense of addiction involved being bound over, dedicated, either legally or spiritually. To devote one’s life, plunge in.

–Infinite Jest p.900