Quotes from David Foster Wallace

No single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.

You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

There is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness.

Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes.

For those who've never experienced a sunrise in the rural midwest, it's roughly as soft and romantic as someone's abruptly hitting the lights in a dark room.

Pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. per se.

This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn't engage anybody.

...the sun would leave my sky if I couldn't assume you'd simply come and tell me you were sad.

Good writing isn't a science. It's an art, and the horizon is infinite. You can always get better.

The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the 'Oh how banal.'

You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.

It's probably hard to feel any sort of Romantic spiritual connection to nature when you have to make your living from it.

To be, in a word, unborable.... It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish

The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.

Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty.

The entire ball game, in terms of both the exam and life, was what you gave attention to vs. what you willed yourself to not.

You get to decide what to worship.

To be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I'm scared about how sappy this'll look in print, saying this.

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.

life's endless war against the self you cannot live without.

A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane.

We're kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we're uneasy about the fact that we wish they'd come back - I mean, what's wrong with us?

I'd like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time, instead of having to go back in my head and enjoy them.

There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration.