Quotes from David Foster Wallace

There are, apparently, persons who are deeply afraid of their own emotions, particularly the painful ones. Grief, regret, sadness. Sadness especially, perhaps. Dolores describes these persons as afraid of obliteration, emotional engulfment. As if something truly and thoroughly felt would have no end or bottom. Would become infinite and engulf them. I am saying that such persons usually have a very fragile sense of themselves as persons. As existing at all

Ortho Stice played with a kind of rigid, liquid grace, like a panther in a back-brace.

Like many Americans of his generation in this awkwardest of post-Imperial decades, an age suspended between exhaustion and replenishment, between input too ordinary to process and input too intense to bear, Sternberg is deeply ambivalent about being embodied; an informing fear that, were he really just an organism, he'd be nothing more than an ism of his organs.

We're a family that takes its home entertainment very seriously.

Hal finds he rather envies a man who feels he has something to explain his being fucked up, parents to blame it on.

Te occidere possunt sed te edere possunt nefas est.

My own terror of appearing sentimental is so strong that I've decided to fight against it, some; but the terror is still there. . . . Do you identify with a distaste/fear about sentimentality? Do you agree that, past a certain line, such distaste can turn everything arch and sneering and too ironic? Or do you have your own set of abstract questions to drive yourself nuts with?

Entertainment provides relief. Art provokes engagement.

T]he worst kind of nihilist—the kind who isn't even aware he's a nihilist.

If you are an adolescent, here is the trick to being neither quite a nerd nor quite a jock: be no one. It is easier than you think.

But I gotta tell you, I just think to look across this room and automatically assume that somebody else is less aware than me, or that somehow their interior life is less rich and complicated and acutely perceived than mine, makes me not a good writer. Because that means I'm going to be performing for a faceless audience instead of trying to have a conversation with a person.

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

The modern woman's a mess of contradictions that they lay on themselves that drives them nuts.

I Philo, educating yourself was something you had to do in spite if school, not because of it -- which is basically why so many of my high school peers are still there in Philo even now, selling one another insurance, drinking supermarket liquor, watching television, awaiting the formality of their first cardiac.

I called a cab, still in my towel. I jumped in the cab before it had even stopped at the gate. I actually said, The nearest library with a cutting-edge professional grief- and trauma-therapy section, and step on it.

This is the kind of paradox, I think, of what it is to be a halfway intelligent American right now, and probably also a Western European, is that there are things we know are right, and good, and would be better for us to do, but constantly it's like Yeah, but, you know, it's so much funnier and nicer to go do something else. and Who cares? and It's all bullshit anyway.

Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval.

the people to be most frightened of are the people who are the most frightened.

Rhythms are relations between what you believe and what you believed before.

In a nation whose great informing myth is that it has no great informing myth, familiarity equaled timelessness

I submit that the real reason we criticized and disliked Lynch's Laura's muddy bothness is that it required of us an empathetic confrontation with the exact same muddy bothness in ourselves and our intimates that makes the real world of moral selves so tense and uncomfortable, a bothness we go to the movies to get a couple hours' fucking relief from.

Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war. The human beauty we're talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings' reconciliation with the fact of having a body.

I have always tried to avoid talking to pretty girls, because pretty girls have a vicious effect on me in which every part of my brain is shut down except for the part that says unbelievably stupid things and the part that is aware that I am saying unbelievably stupid things.

The other half is to dramatize that we still 'are' human beings, now. Or can be.