“ The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. ”
- David Foster Wallace- Copy
- 2.7K
“ If you worship money and things – if they are where you tap real meaning in life – then you will never have enough. ”
- David Foster Wallace- Copy
- 1.6K
“ I’m so scared of dying without ever being really seen. ”
- David Foster Wallace- Copy
- 2.5K
“ We’re all lonely for something we don’t know we’re lonely for. ”
- David Foster Wallace- Copy
- 879
“ You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. ”
- David Foster Wallace- Copy
- 1.5K
“ How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words. ”
- David Foster Wallace- Copy
- 836
“ Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he’s devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. ”
- David Foster Wallace- Copy
- 3.4K
“ We’re all lonely for something we don’t know we’re lonely for. ”
- David Foster Wallace- Copy
- 1.6K
“ Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. ”
- David Foster Wallace- Copy
“ Everything I’ve ever let go of had claw marks on it. ”
- David Foster Wallace- Copy
- 1.7K
“ Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly. ”
- David Foster Wallace- Copy
- 1.6K
“ Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties — all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name’s Dave and I live in a one. by. one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion — these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated. ”
- David Foster Wallace- Copy
- 3.7K
“ The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. ”
- David Foster Wallace- Copy
- 2.8K
“ To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like ‘deadly dull’ or ‘excruciatingly dull’ come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient, lowlevel way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing’s pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly…but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places any more but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets’ checkouts, airport gates, SUVs’ backseats. Walkman, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s socalled ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows it’s about something else, way down. ”
- David Foster Wallace- Copy
- 1.1K
“ Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?" "I give." "You get someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog. ”
- David Foster Wallace- Copy
- 1.5K
“ There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water? ”
- David Foster Wallace- Copy
- 3.6K
“ Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere Mary went, the lights became erratic. ”
- David Foster Wallace- Copy
- 2K
“ The integrity of my sleep has been forever compromised, sir. ”
- David Foster Wallace- Copy
- 3.9K
“ Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still. ”
- David Foster Wallace- Copy
- 2.2K
“ It's always seemed a little preposterous that Hamlet, for all his paralyzing doubt about everything, never once doubts the reality of the ghost. Never questions his own madness might not in fact be unfeigned. ”
- David Foster Wallace- Copy
- 1.3K
“ 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. ”
- David Foster Wallace- Copy
- 3.9K
“ 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. ”
- David Foster Wallace- Copy
- 470
“ Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?" "I give." "You get someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog. ”
- David Foster Wallace- Copy
- 2.9K
“ Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the dayto day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritualtype thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. ”
- David Foster Wallace- Copy
- 1.2K
“ So tonight to shush you how about if I say I have administrative bones to pick with God, Boo. I'll say God seems to have a kind of laidback management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty much antideath. God looks by all accounts to be prodeath. I'm not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I, Boo. ”
- David Foster Wallace- Copy
- 1.2K
“ The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you. ”
- David Foster Wallace- Copy
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“ That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack. That concentrating on anything is very hard work. ”
- David Foster Wallace- Copy
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“ Worship your body, beauty, and sexual allure and you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. ”
- David Foster Wallace- Copy
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