Quotes from David Foster Wallace

This, according to the fellows who saw me as fit for a Service career, put me ahead of the curve, to understand this truth at an age when most guys are starting only to suspect the basics of adulthood--that life owes you nothing; that suffering takes many forms; that no one will ever care for you as your mother did; that the human heart is a chump.

I simply must say, as crass as we are conditioned by a troubled society to regard the word, I am a firm believer in the comparative merits of the word 'fuck.

If you've never wept and want to, have a child.

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

The encaged and suicidal have a really hard time imagining anyone caring passionately about anything.

You'll worry less about what people think about you when you realize how seldom they do.

and suddenly it occurred to him 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 other 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 for some reason.

Fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being. If you operate, which most of us do, from the premise that there are things about the contemporary U.S. that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being, then maybe half of fiction's job is to dramatize what makes it tough. The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still are human beings, now. Or can be…I just think that fiction that isn't exploring what it means to be human today isn't good art.

There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact - in its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of social equality for social equality itself - of vastly more help to conservatives and the US status quo than traditional SNOOT prescriptions ever were.

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

I am wonderful fun to talk to. I'm a consummate professional. People leave my parlor in states. You are here. It's conversation-time. Shall we discuss Byzantine erotica?

every failure is also a victory.

You must have been traumatized beyond fucking belief

This appetite to choose death by pleasure if it is available to choose - this appetite of your people unable to choose appetites, this is the death.

Who would die for this chance to be fed this death of pleasure with spoons, in their warm homes, alone, unmoving?

Dieting makes me want to murder everyone around me.

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 laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I'm not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I, Boo.

It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms nearly always shoot themselves in...the head. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

It's one of those unpleasant opioid feverish half-sleep states, more a fugue-state than a sleep-state, less a floating than like being cast adrift on rough seas, tossed mightily in and out of this half-sleep where your mind's still working and you can ask yourself whether you're asleep even as you dream. And any dreams you do have seem ragged at the edges, gnawed on, incomplete.

It's like a fugue of evaded responsibility.

Footnote: 79) The anchor is gigantic and must weigh a hundred tons, and -- delightfully -- it really is anchor-shaped, i.e. the same shape as anchors in tattoos.

Aren't there parts of ourselves that are just better left unfed?

It never once occurs to him, though, that the reason he's so unhappy is that he's an asshole.

Think of the old cliché about "the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master." This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.