Quotes from David Foster Wallace

JAY: Why is a story more upfront than life? LENORE: It just seems more honest, somehow. JAY: Honest meaning closer to the truth? LENORE: I smell trap. JAY: I smell breakthrough. The truth is that there's no difference between a life and a story? But a life pretends to be something more? But it really isn't more? LENORE: I would kill for a shower.

I didn't stand for anything. If I wanted to matter - even just to myself - I would have to be less free, by deciding to choose in some kind of definite way.

Look-At-Me-Being-So-Totally-Open-And-Sincere-I-Rise-Above-The-Whole-Disingenuous-Posing-Process-Of-Attracting-Someone-,-And-I-Transcend-The-Common-Disingenuity-In-A-Bar-Herd-In-A-Particularly-Hip-And-Witty-Self-Aware-Way-,-And-If-You-Will-Let-Me-Pick-You-Up-I-Will-Not-Only-Keep-Being-This-Wittily,-Transcendently-Open-,-But-Will-Bring-You-Into-This-World-Of-Social-Falsehood-Transcendence

I think the world divides neatly into those who are excited by the managed induction of terror and those who are not. I do not find terror exciting. I find it terrifying.

This is what happens: you imagine the things I will say and then say them for me and then become angry with them. Without my mouth; it never opens. You speak to yourself, inventing sides. This itself is the habit of children: lazy, lonely, self.

If I'm hanging out with you, I can't even tell whether I like you or not because I'm too worried about whether you like me.

Where do they get these giant flags? What happens to them when there's no campaign? Where do they go? Where do you even store flags that size? Or is there maybe just one, which McCain2000's advance team has to take down afterward and hurtle with to the next THM to get it put up before McCain and the cameras arrive? Do Gore and the Shrub and all the other candidates each have their own giant flag?)

He was unsure what the thing inside him was and was unprepared to commit himself to the course of action that would be required to explore the question.

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.' 'Engulf means obliterate.

If you close your eyes on a busy urban sidewalk the sound of everybody's different footwear's footsteps all put together sounds like something getting chewed by something huge and tireless and patient.

We think of ourselves now as eaters of the pie instead of makes of the pie...Corporations make the pie. They make it and we eat it.

that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.

That females are capable of being just as vulgar about sexual and eliminatory functions as males.

But what of Lenore, of Lenore's hair? Here is hair that is clearly within and of itself every color—blond and red and jet-black-blue and honeynut—but which effects an outward optical compromise with possibility that consists of appearing simply dull brown, save for brief teasing glimpses out of the corner of one's eye.

Que todas as pessoas são iguais na sua secreta e silenciosa crença de que no fundo são diferentes de todas as outras.

This is so stupid it practically drools.

He just sits there. I want to be like that. Able to just sit all quiet and pull life toward me, one forehead at a time. His name is supposedly Lyle.

Do this: hate him for me after I die. I beg you. Dying request.

Statisticians report that television is watched over six hours a day in the average American household. I don't know any fiction writers who live in average American households. I suspect Louise Erdrich might. Actually I have never seen an average American household. Except on TV.

The 'base frees and condenses, compresses the whole experience to the implosion of one terrible shattering spike in the graph, an afflated orgasm of the heart that makes her feel, truly, attractive, sheltered by limits, deveiled and loved, observed and alone and sufficient and female, full, as if watched for an instant by God.

Now a second-order vain person is a vain person who's also vain about appearing to have an utter lack of vanity. Who's enormously afraid that other people will perceive him as vain. A second-order vain person will sit up late learning jokes in order to appear funny and charming, but will deny that he sits up late learning jokes. Or he'll perhaps even try to give the impression that he doesn't regard himself as funny at all.

The fraud part of me was always there, just as a puzzle piece, objectively speaking, is a true piece of the puzzle even before you see how it fits.

The sky is low and gray and loose and seems to hang. There's something baggy about the sky.

The trees' bony fingers make spell-casting gestures in the wind as they pass.