Quotes from David Foster Wallace

Wolf-Spiders Ruleth the Land

His parents' pregnancies must have been all-out chromosomatic war

The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation.

I go through a loop in which I notice all the ways I am...self-centered and careerist and not true to standards and values that transcend my own petty interests...but then I countenance the fact here at least here I am worrying about it; so then I feel better about myself...but this soon becomes a vehicle for feeling superior to imagined Others...I think I'm very honest and candid, but I'm also proud of how honest and candid I am--so where does that put me.

THE MAN WHO KNOWS HIS LIMITATIONS HAS NONE.

You might consider how to escape from a cage must surely require, foremost, awareness of the fact of the cage.

God and Satan play poker with Tarot cards for the soul of an alcoholic sandwich-bag salesman obsessed with Bernini's 'The Ecstasy of St. Teresa.

This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can't think anyone really believes that today's so-called 'information society' is just about information. Everyone knows it's about something else, way down.

08/14/1025h. Dessert Competitions. 08/14/1315h. Illinois State Fair Infirmary; then motel; then Springfield Memorial Medical Center Emergency Room for distention and possible rupture of transverse colon (false alarm); then motel; incapacitated till well after sunset; whole day a washout; incredibly embarrassing, unprofessional; indescribable. Delete entire day.

Everyone should get at least one good look at the eyes of a man who finds himself rising toward what he wants to pull down to himself.

That having sex with someone you do not care for feels lonelier than not having sex in the first place, afterward.

I think I was very often bored as a child, but boredom is not what I knew it as—what I knew was that I worried a lot

I wonder if anyone feels as though they're the same person they seem to remember. It would make them have a nervous breakdown. It probably wouldn't even make sense. I don't know if this is enough. I don't know what anybody else has told you.

Life is life tennis: Those who serve best usually win.

Every whole person has ambitions, objectives, initiatives, goals. This one particular boy's goal was to be able to press his lips to every square inch of his own body. His arms to the shoulders and most of the legs beneath the knee were child's play. After these areas of his body, however, the difficulty increased with the abruptness of a coastal shelf. The boy came to understand that unimaginable challenges lay ahead of him. He was six.

So my offense is what, misdemeanor gargling?

The kid has no idea he even knows something's wrong

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

These worst mornings with cold floors and hot windows and merciless light—the soul's certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer.

Do exactly as you please–if you still trust what seems to please you.

I've already just completely opened up about my shame and my inability to be open and straightforward about this. You're exposing something I've already held up to view. It's your shame about being ashamed of what you're afraid might be seen as a lack of brightness that's getting to stay buried under this dead horse of my deformity that you're trying to whip.

You believe you would die twice for another but in truth would die only for your alone self, its sentiment.

When something large and oncoming passed, the windshield's big rectangle was for a moment incandesced and opaque with water, which the wipers heaved mightily to displace.

It's not that students don't get Kafka's humor but that we've taught them to see humor as something you get-the same way we've taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle.