Quotes from David Foster Wallace

As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

You decide. You be the judge. It says You are welcome regardless of severity. Severity is in the eye of the sufferer, it says. Pain is pain.

He had never been so anxious for the arrival of a woman he did not want to see.

Organized shuffleboard has always filled me with dread. Everything about it suggests infirm senescence and death: it's a game played on the skin of a void, and the rasp of the sliding puck is the sound of that skin getting abraded away bit by bit.

talent is sort of a dark gift, that talent is its own expectation: it is there from the start and either lived up to or lost.

It seems significant that we don't want things to be quiet, ever, anymore.

What I know about auto racing could be inscribed with a dry Magic Marker on the lip of a Coke bottle.

Feral hamsters are not pets. They mean business.

Surely we all dealt with and reconciled ourselves to a life many of whose features were out of our control. It was part of living in a world full of other people with other interests.

Material possession is one thing, but ideological passion disgusts us on some deep level.

Today's sub-40s have different horrors, prominent among which are anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without once having loved something more than yourself.

To be envied, admired, is not a feeling. Nor is fame it feeling. There are feelings associated with fame, but few of them are any more enjoyable than the feelings associated with envy of fame.

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. I am not even here, possibly, for listening to.

giving me the exact kind of smile of someone who, on Christmas morning, has just unwrapped an expensive present he already owns.

had numerous pairs of dress chinos and blue blazers and Topsiders, and a smile that looked as though someone had plugged him in.

Their handshake looked, for the first split-second he looked, like C.T. was jacking off and the little girl was going Sieg Heil.

It'll help your attitude to look for evidence of design.

Chutes and Ladders was perhaps the most sadistic board game ever invented. Adults loathed the game; children loved it. The universe thus dictated that an adult invariably got snookered into playing the game with a child.

The placid hopelessness of adulthood. The complex regret.

Gentlemen- by which I mean, of course, latter adolescents who aspire to manhood gentlemen, here is a truth: Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is. Such endurance is, as it happens, the distillate of what is, today, in this world neither you nor I have made, heroism. Heroism

You can be at certain parties and not really be there.

He said she went around with her feelings out in front of her with an arm around the feelings' windpipe and a Glock 9 mm. to the feelings' temple like a terrorist with a hostage, daring you to shoot.

just the thought of getting up made me glad I was lying on the floor.

It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames.