Quotes from David Foster Wallace

having a lot of money does not immunize people from suffering or fear.

I balked at trying antidepressants, I just couldn't see myself taking pills to try to be less of a fraud.

I think the language needs to find new ways to pull the reader. And my personal belief is a lot of it has to do with voice, and a feeling of intimacy between the writer and the reader. That sorta, given the atomization and loneliness of contemporary life - that's our opening, and that's' our gift.

Among pernicious myths is the one where people always get very upbeat and generous and other-directed right before they eliminate their own map for keeps. The truth is that the hours before a suicide are usually an interval of enormous conceit and self-involvement.

That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness.

You don't have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness … has to do with angst about death, the recognition that I'm going to die, and die very much alone, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily on without me.

That something smelled delicious! ' I screamed.

From that day, whether I could articulate it satisfactorily or not,' Day says, holding the knee of the leg just crossed, 'I understood on an intuitive level why people killed themselves. If I had to go for any length of time with that feeling I'd surely kill myself.' 'Time in the shadow of the wing of the thing too big to see, rising.

And it never even occurs to them their certainty that they are different is what makes them the same.

None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death.

Don't worry about getting in touch with your feelings, they'll get in touch with you.

so full of himself he could have shit limbs.

there was always something disappointing about clouds when you were inside them; they ceased to be clouds at all. It just got really foggy.

Knowing that internal stress could cause failure on the exam merely set up internal stress about the prospect of internal stress.

You're supposed to be strong enough to exert some control over how much you want to hide, and you're so desperate to feel some kind of control that you settle for the appearance of control.

What you do is you hide your deep need to hide, and you do this out of the need to appear to other people as if you have the strength not to care how you appear to others.

It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed ... If a person in physical pain has a hard time attending to anything except that pain, a clinically depressed person cannot even perceive any other person or thing as independent of the universal pain that is digesting her cell by cell.

It's well-known that an overkeen sense of obligation tends to afflict the congenitally nice.

Somos lo que caminamos entre dos puntos.

Interesting. Stonecipheco Baby Foods. Not a bad line of products, really. A bit soft and runny for my taste, of course. . . . Well, it's infant food, really, Norman.

Life is essentially one long search for an ashtray.

Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.

Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies.

And her eyes. I cannot say what color Lenore Beadsman's eyes are; I cannot look at them; they are the sun to me.