Quotes from David Foster Wallace

if you think the corporations are evil and it's the government's job to make them moral, you're deflecting your own responsibility to civics. You're making the government your big brother and the corporation the evil bully your big brother's supposed to keep off you at recess.

I am also concerned not to come off as shrill or preachy when what I really am is more like confused.

Insects all business all the time.

By the way, I do think that awareness is different from thinking. I am similar to most other people, I believe, in that I do not really do my most important thinking in large, intentional blocks where I sit down uninterrupted in a chair and know in advance what it is I'm going to think about... It doesn't work like that for me.

this was depressing, much the way discovering that somebody is easy to manipulate is always a little depressing.

as he finally sheds his body's suit, ------ finds his gut and throat again and newly whole, clean and unimpeded, free, catapulted home over fans and the Convexity's glass palisades at desperate speeds, soaring north, sounding a bell-clear and nearly maternal alarmed call-to-arms in all the world's well-known tongues.

I hated it here. And I have never been as happy as when I was here. And these two things together confront me with the beak and claws of the True.

The bus had a lavatory in the wayback rear, which no one ever made any attempt to use, and I remember consciously deciding to trust that the passengers had good reason for not using it instead of venturing in and discovering that reason for myself.

That God might regard the issue of whether you believe there's a God or not as fairly low on his/her/its list of things s/he/it's interested in re you.

the only real significance she had attached to the memory was that it was funny what stuck with you.

Fervent Christians are always remembering themselves as - and thus, by extension, judging everyone else outside their sect to be - lost and hopeless and just barely clinging to any kind of interior sense of value or reason or even to go on living, before they were 'saved.

What fire dies when you feed it?

That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we're all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine.

That it takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak.

I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies.

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

When they were introduced, he made a witicism, hoping to be liked. She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces.

Perhaps this is what it means to go mad: to be emptied and to be aware of the emptiness.

Te Occidere Possunt Sed Te Edere Non Possunt Nefas Est (Roughly, 'They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier').

There's more to life than sitting there interfacing, it might be a newsflash to you.

the drowned panic of not being able to ask questions or have any input into what somebody's saying is so awful it sort of dwarfs the pain.

I think, today's irony ends up saying: How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.

YES, I'M PARANOID—BUT AM I PARANOID ENOUGH?

one is that you attain the goal and realize the shocking realization that attaining the goal does not complete or redeem you, does not make everything for your life "OK " as you are, in the culture, educated to assume it will do this, the goal. And then you face this fact that what you had thought would have the meaning does not have the meaning when you get it, and you are impaled by shock.