Quotes from David Foster Wallace

Once he'd been set off inside, it mattered so much that he was somehow afraid to show how much it mattered.

What if in fact there were ever only two really distinct individual people walking around back there in history's mist? That all difference descends from this difference? The whole and the partial. The damaged and the intact. The deformed and the paralyzingly beautiful. The insane and the attendant. The hidden and the blindingly open. The performer and the audience. No Zen-type One, always rather Two, one upside-down in a convex lens.

A real leader can somehow get us to do certain things that deep down we think are good and want to be able to do but usually can't get ourselves to do on our own.

It's weird to feel like you miss someone you're not even sure you know.

He didn't reject the idea so much as not react to it and watch as it floated away. He thought very broadly of desires and ideas being watched but not acted upon, he thought of impulses being starved of expression and drying out and floating dryly away, and

That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt.

I mean, Tarantino is such a SHMUCK 90 percent of the time. But ten percent of the time, I've seen genius shining off the guy.

true decency was very different from pathological generosity, because pathological generosity did not take into account the feelings of the people who were the object of the generosity?

The great myth is that the bad ones don't last long.

Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship---be it Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles---is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

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.

As most adults know, the distinctions between one's essential character and value and people's perceptions of that character/value are fuzzy and hard to delineate, especially in adolescence.

Irony tyrannizes us. All US irony is based on an implicit 'I don't really mean what I'm saying.

It's no coincidence it's the gurus on mountains who're wise. You get to the top: you're already theirs.

It's painful to believe that the would-be 'public servants' you're forced to choose between are all phonies whose only real concern is their own care and feeding and who will lie so outrageously and with such a straight face that you know they've just got to believe you're an idiot.

The fact is that we're all lonely, of course. Everyone knows this, it's almost a cliché.

The worst thing about irony for me is that it attenuates emotion.

Alls—how it's possible even the worst things that can happen to you can end up being positive factors in who you are.

In fact, pop-cultural references have become such potent metaphors in U.S. fiction not only because of how united Americans are in our exposure to mass images but also because of our guilty indulgent psychology with respect to that exposure. Put simply, the pop reference works so well in contemporary fiction because (1) we all recognize such a reference, and (2) we're all a little uneasy about how we all recognize such a reference.

He has that rare spinal appreciation for beauty in the ordinary that nature seems to bestow on those who have no native words for what they see.

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

You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place. It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again.

ragweed,wild oat,vetch,butcher grass,invaginate volunteer beans,all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother's soft hand on your cheek...

And although I played along with him for a while so as not to prick his bubble, inside I felt pretty bleak indeed, because now I knew that he was going to be just as pliable and credulous as everyone else, he didn't appear to have anything close to the firepower I'd need to give me any hope of getting helped out of the trap of fraudulence and unhappiness I'd constructed for myself.