Quotes from David Foster Wallace

Talk about solid turds all you want. The molecular integrity of shit is small potatoes.

It's not that words or human language stop having any meaning or relevance after you die, by the way.

The doctor gazed at her with a patience she was meant to see.

a quick intelligence he squanders on an insatiable need to advance some impression of himself—that

a thing among things, its self's soul so much vapor aloft, falling as rain and then rising, the sun up and down like a yoyo.

What if I told you she could because she's had this happen and she totally knows it's possible to be just a thing but just like Victor Frankl that every minute from then on minute by minute if you want you can choose to be more if you want, you can choose to be a human being and have it mean something? Then what would you say?

The punter never made her feel quite so taken care of, never made her feel about to be entered by something that didn't know she was there and yet was all about making her feel good anyway, coming in. Entertainment is blind.

It occurred to me that the movement of the amputated knob perfectly schematized what it would look like for someone to try to turn somersaults with one hand nailed to the floor. This was how I first became interested in the possibilities of annulation.

It's probably part of my naïveté that I don't want to put the issue in political terms when it's probably irreducibly political. Something has happened where we've decided on a personal level that it's all right to abdicate our individual responsibility to the common good and let government worry about the common good while we all go about our individual self-interested business and struggle to gratify our various appetites.

She almost reminds the engineer of certain types in high school whom everyone adored because you sensed it made no difference to them whether you adored them.

boring activities become, perversely, much less boring if you concentrate intently on them.

Imagine the day after the Berlin Wall came down if everybody in East Germany was plump and comfortable-looking and dressed in Caribbean pastels, and you'll have a pretty good idea what the Fort Lauderdale Airport terminal looks like today.

other people can often see things about you that you yourself cannot see, even if those people are stupid.

The mother at thirty with face commencing to display the faint seams of the plan for the second face life had in store for her and which she feared would be her own mother's

It may well be that we, spectators, who are not divinely gifted as athletes, are the only ones able truly to see, articulate, and animate the experience of the gift we are denied. And that those who receive and act out the gift of athletic genius must, perforce, be blind and dumb about it -- and not because blindness and dumbness are the price of the gift, but because they are its essence.

God—unless you're Charlton Heston, or unhinged, or both—speaks and acts entirely through the vehicle of human beings, if there is a God.

The people who are rebelling meaningfully don't buy a lot of stuff.

Sounds kind of ad hoc and jerry-rigged and haphazard.' 'Everybody's a critic. This wasn't an aesthetic endeavor.

Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans.

It never occurred to him to ask her what sort of demeanor she preferred. He didn't have to strategize or even scheme. Later he knew what the dread had been dread of. He hadn't had to promise her anything, it turned out. It was all for free.

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.

That the people to be most frightened of are the people who are the most frightened.

For 360 minutes per diem, we receive unconscious reinforcement of the deep thesis that the most significant feature of truly alive persons is watchableness, and that genuine human worth is not just identical with but rooted in the phenomenon of watching.

Te diré que Dios parece tener un estilo de dirección técnica que a mí no me gusta nada. Yo soy bastante antimuerte. Y Dios da toda la impresión de ser bastante pro-muerte. No sé cómo nos vamos a poner de acuerdo al respecto él y yo, Bubú.