Quotes from David Foster Wallace

Some persons can give themselves away to an ambitious pursuit and have that be all the giving-themselves-away-to-something they need to do. Though sometimes this changes as the players get older and the pursuit more stress-fraught. American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.

I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

I felt more solidly composed, now that I was horizontal. I was impossible to knock down.

Hal Incandenza has an almost obsessive dislike for deLint, whom he tells Mario he sometimes cannot quite believe is even real, and tries to get to the side of, to see whether deLint has a true z coordinate or is just a cutout or projection.

Can you choose something when you are forcefully and enthusiastically immersed in it at an age when the resources and information necessary for choosing are not yet yours?

The horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle: That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. —David Foster Wallace, "Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness" (2005)

Certain sincerely devout and spiritually advanced people believe that the God of their understanding helps them find parking places and gives them advice on Mass. Lottery numbers.

there is an ending [to Infinite Jest] as far as I'm concerned. Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an end can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame. If no such convergence or projection occured to you, then the book's failed for you.

I felt the sort of soaring, ceilingless tedium that transcends tedium and becomes worry.

He knew what the Beats know and what the great tennis player knows, son: learn to do nothing, with your whole head and body, and everything will be done by what's around you.

But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

I]f the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is.

It is about simple awareness — awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: "This is water, this is water.

his own father told him that talent is sort of a dark gift, that talent is its own expectation: it is there from the start and either lived up to or lost.

Here is how to handle being a feral prodigy.

Say the whole point of love is to try to get your fingers through the holes in the lover's mask. To get some kind of hold on the mask, and who cares how you do it.

A verdade é aquilo que te torna livre. Mas só depois de ter acabado contigo.

You'll stop worrying what others think about you when you realize how seldom they do.

Nothing brings you together like a common enemy.

Which he said was the big lie they all bought that made doctors and standard therapy such a waste of time for people like us -- they thought that diagnosis was the same as cure. That if you knew why, it would stop. Which is bullshit. You only stop if you stop.

With still, underneath, the old respectable-girl-versus-slut thing. It's OK to fuck around if you're a feminist but it's also not OK to fuck around because most guys aren't feminists and won't respect you and won't call you again if you fuck around.

it occurred that the birds, whose twitters and repeated songs sounded so pretty and affirming of nature and the coming day, might actually, in a code known only to other birds, be the birds each saying 'Get away' or 'This branch is mine!' or 'This tree is mine! I'll kill you! Kill, kill!' Or any manner of dark, brutal, or self-protective stuff--they might be listening to war cries. The thought came from nowhere and made his spirits dip from some reason.

The reality is that dying isn't bad, but it takes forever. And that forever is no time at all. I know that sounds like a contradiction, or maybe just wordplay. What it really is, it turns out, is a matter of perspective. —David Foster Wallace "Good Old Neon" (2004)

Describe-the-sort-of-man-you-find-attractive-and-I'll-affect-the-demeanor-of-that-sort-of-man