David Foster Wallace Quotes

Why not? Why not?Why not not, then, if the best reasoning you can contrive is why not?

Here is how to handle being a feral prodigy.

We're not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader's own life "outside" the story changes the story.

Ideally, each piece of art's its own unique object, and its evaluation's always present-tense.

And he wishes, in the cold quiet of his archer's heart, that he himself could feel the intensity of their reconciliations as strongly as he feels that of their battles.

I know I never work in whatever gets called an office, e.g., a school office I use only for meeting students and storing books I know I'm not going to read anytime soon.

I perhaps could have been somewhat better. One of the interesting things about playing competitive sports as a child is that you confront your own limitations rather starkly at a certain point.

I tend to think of fiction as being mainly about characters and human beings and inner experience, whereas essays can be much more expository and didactic and more about subjects or ideas.

Not having a passport makes me very blasé about what appears in foreign periodicals since I know I'll never see it.

There's a weird kind of paradox that the more expensive the vacation is, the more potentially anxiety-producing it is.

My personal belief is that because technology and economic logic has gotten so sophisticated, cruelties can be perpetrated now that would have been unimaginable two or three hundred years ago.

David Foster Wallace: Because I'd like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time instead of having to go back in my head and enjoy them then.

This is why they started us here so young: to give ourselves away before the age when the questions 'why' and 'to what' grow real beaks and claws.

We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately (...) To games or needles, to some other person.

Think of the old cliché about the mind being 'an excellent servant but a terrible master'. This, like many clichés, so lame & banal on the surface, actually expresses a great & terrible truth.

Why is the truth usually not just un- but anti-interesting?

I'm so scared of dying without ever being really seen.

Words and a book and a belief that the world is words...

What I know about auto racing could be inscribed with a dry Magic Marker on the lip of a Coke bottle.

How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?

Tell them there are no holes for your fingers in the masks ofmen. Tell them how could you ever even hope to love what you can'tgrab onto.

There’s been time this whole time. You can’t kill time with your heart. Everything takes time.

I guess a bit part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves.

For reasons that are not well understood, war's codes are safer for most of us than love's.

There is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.

Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human i

You decide. You be the judge. It says You are welcome regardless of severity. Severity is in the eye of the sufferer, it says. Pain is pain.

Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies.

a manual for how to build a mentally ill child

Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

If an art form is marginalized it's because it's not speaking to people.

It's not what you lift, it's where you carry it.

I don't think irony's meant to synergize with anything as heartfelt assadness.

For me, boviscopophobia (=the morbid fear of being seen as bovine) is an even stronger motive than semi-agoraphobia for staying on the ship when we're in port.

...having a lot of money does not immunize people from suffering or fear.

She smelled of talcum powder and Big Red.

The reasons that center on others are easy to manipulate. All hollow things are light.

The fraud part of me was always there, just as a puzzle piece, objectively speaking, is a true piece of the puzzle even before you see how it fits.

People hate people, not freedom.

Be on guard. The road widens, and many of the detours are seductive.

I think I was very often bored as a child, but boredom is not what I knew it as—what I knew was that I worried a lot

She was terrified of everything, and terrified to show it.

It's no accident that in a bureaucracy getting fired is called 'termination, ' as in ontological erasure.

We're all on each other's food chain. All of us. It's an individual sport. Welcome to the meaning of individual. We're each deeply alone here. It's what we all have in common, this aloneness.

Commercial comedy's often set up to feature an ironist makingdevastating sport of someone who's naive or sentimental or pretentious orpompous.

The mother at thirty with face commencing to display the faint seams of the plan for the second face life had in store for her and which she feared would be her own mother’s

I never, even for a moment, doubted what they’d told me. This is why it is that adults and even parents can, unwittingly, be cruel: they cannot imagine doubt’s complete absence. They have forgotten.

His parents’ pregnancies must have been all-out chromosomatic war

You might consider how to escape from a cage must surely require, foremost, awareness of the fact of the cage.

And it never even occurs to them their certainty that they are different is what makes them the same.