Quotes from David Foster Wallace

It's weird to feel like you miss someone you're not even sure you know.

Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.

What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human [...] is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.

We're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we've never even met?

It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.

Fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being.

Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I'm bullshitting myself, morally speaking?

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.

Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.

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?

Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself.

What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves, they've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.

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.

I had kind of a midlife crisis at twenty which probably doesn't augur well for my longevity

God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about.

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.

The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush.

I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art.

One paradox of professional writing is that books written solely for money and/or acclaim will almost never be good enough to garner either.

In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.

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

....basically the sort of guy who looks entirely at home in sockless white loafers and a mint-green knit shirt from Lacoste.

For me, boviscopophobia (=the morbid fear of being seen as bovine) is an even stronger motive than semi-agoraphobia for staying on the ship when we're in port.

Everything I've ever let go of has claw marks on it.