Quotes from David Foster Wallace

It's always seemed a little preposterous that Hamlet, for all his paralyzing doubt about everything, never once doubts the reality of the ghost. Never

Naive people are, more or less by definition, unaware that they're naive.

What seems most important is that Dostoevsky's near-death experience changed a typically vain and trendy young writer-a very talented writer, true, but still one whose basic concerns were for his own literary glory-into a person who believed deeply in moral/spiritual values...more, into someone who believed that a life lived without moral/spiritual values was not just incomplete but depraved.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention ad awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad, petty, unsexy ways every day.

Look down your shirt and spell attic.

The moral system of a college fraternity turns out to be classically tribal, i.e., characterized by a deeply felt sense of honor, discretion, and loyalty to one's so-called 'brothers,' coupled with a complete, sociopathic lack of regard for the interests or even humanity of anyone outside that fraternal set.

The thing about people who are truly and malignantly crazy: their real genius is for making the people around them think they themselves are crazy.

Do not underestimate objects, he advises Stice. Do not leave objects out of account. The world, after all, which is radically old, is made up of mostly objects.

We're going to reinvent not just government but history. Torch the past.

The neurology of failure. What if he was simply born and destined to live in the shadow of Total Fear and Despair, and all his so-called activities were pathetic attempts to distract him from the inevitable?

No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories.

That everybody's sneeze sounds different.

I fear this feeling more than I fear anything, man. More than pain, or my mom dying, or environmental toxicity. Anything.

How to keep the seductive ghost of bliss long absconded from baiting you and hooking you and pulling you back out and eating your heart raw and (if you're lucky) eliminating your map for good.

Johnny Gentle, the first U.S. President ever to swing his microphone around by the cord during his Inauguration speech.

The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. States as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude - but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense.

Y qué pasa cuando a veces no hay opción sobre lo que amar? ¿Y si el templo va a Mahoma? ¿Y si simplemente amas? ¿Sin decidirlo? Lo haces simplemente: la ves y en ese instante te olvidas de la contabilidad y lo único que puedes elegir es amarla...

Time wasn't passing so much as kneeling beside him in a torn tee-shirt disclosing the rodent-nosed tits of a man who disdains the care of his once-comely bod.

It's always the same sort of grim windy Northeast November day where if you were at home you'd be eating earth-tone soups in a warm kitchen, listening to the wind and glad of home and hearth.

gesture a lot and look wild-eyed and generally pissed-off in some broad geopolitical way.

Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn't enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they're not even very good.

Its emotional character … is probably mostly indescribable except as a sort of double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency —sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying— are not just unpleasant but literally horrible.

The amount of organization and toiletry-lugging he has to do to get secretly high in front of a subterranean outtake vent in the pre-supper gap would make a lesser man quail.

There is something deeply surreal about standing behind a female performer in hotpink peau de soie, a woman whose clitoris and perineum you have priorly seen, and watching her try to get a microwaved egg roll onto her plate with a cocktail fork. —David Foster Wallace, "Big Red Son" (1998)