Quotes from David Foster Wallace

naïveté is the last true terrible sin in the theology of millennial America.

We will, of course, without hesitation use art to parody, ridicule, debunk, or criticize ideologies--but this is very different.

Existence and life break people in all kinds of awful fucking ways all the time.

Cornell University Press announced plans for a festschrift.

in winter's watered-down light—just

rabid distrust of what they consider authority without evidently once stopping to consider the rigid authoritarianism implicit in the rigid uniformity of their own quote unquote nonconformist uniform, vocabulary, attitudes

Ten un padre cuyo propio padre perdió lo que estaba ahí. Ten un padre que cumplió su propia promesa y luego encontró una cosa tras otra y superó las expectativas de su propia promesa y no pareció estar mucho más feliz ni más seguro que su propio padre fracasado, dejándote en una especie de estado salvaje y de encrucijada de flujos con respecto al talento.

Lenore, it's simply that I love you. You know that. Every fiber of your being is loved by every fiber of my being. The thought of things about you, concerning you, troubling you, that I don't know about, makes blood run from my eyes, on the inside.

Devils are actually angels.

Then Poor Tony's body began to swell. He watched his limbs become airy white dirigibles and felt them deny his authority and detach from him and float sluggishly up snout-first into the steel-mill sparks the ceiling rained. He suddenly felt nothing, or rather Nothing, a pre-tornadic stillness of zero sensation, as if he were the very space he occupied.

I think serious art is supposed to make us confront things that are difficult in ourselves and in the world.

and David Wallace blinks in the midst of idly scanning class photos from his 1980 Aurora West H.S. yearbook and seeing my photo and trying, through the tiny little keyhole of himself, to imagine what all must have happened to lead up to my death in the fiery single-car accident he'd read about in 1991...

then more Losses, with the Substance seeming like the only consolation against the pain of the mounting Losses, and of course you're in Denial about it being the Substance that's causing the very Losses it's consoling you about -

When I was drunk I wanted to get sober and when I was sober I wanted to get drunk,' John L. says; 'I lived that way for years, and I submit to you that's not livin that's a fuckin death-in-life.

Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he's devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It's hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.

So if we think about ourselves with respect to the game, we're thinking about our thinking. And we decided the one thing we couldn't think about was our thinking, because the object has to be Other. We can think only the things that can't think themselves. So if we think ourselves, see for instance conceiving ourselves as thought, we can't ourselves be the object of our thinking.

learn to do nothing, with your whole head and body, and everything will be done by what's around you.

The core accounting equation A = L + E can be dissolved and reshuffled into everything from E = A - L to beyond.

You're wearing that bow tie, after all. Isn't that rather an invitation to a young sir?

A U.S. of modern A. where the State is not a team or a code, but a sort of sloppy intersection of desires and fears, where the only public consensus a boy must surrender to is the acknowledged primacy of straight-line pursuing this flat and short-sighted idea of personal happiness: The happy pleasure of the person alone, yes?

You know those mass-market cartridges, for the masses? The ones that are so bad they're somehow perversely good? This was worse than that.

O está pasando algo, un extraño vínculo que siento que nos une, algo así como si se me cayeran todas las defensas personales y me abriera totalmente a ti? Supongo que debo esperar que no te aproveches. ¿Te suena esto como algo burdo? Tal vez lo sea. Supongo que me gustaría estar más tranquilo. No sé qué hacer salvo contarte lo que siento en mi interior, aunque parezca una torpeza.

There is something magical to me about literature and fiction and I think it can do things not only that pop culture cannot do but that are urgent now: one is that by creating a character in a work of fiction you can allow a reader to leap over the wall of self and to allow him to imagine himself not only somewhere else but someone else in a way that television and movies, in a way that no other form can do. I think people are essentially lonely and alone and frightened of being alone.

On the other hand, there are those who feel that fiction can be challenging, generally and thematically, and even on a sentence-by-sentence basis—that it's okay if a person needs to work a bit while reading, for the rewards can be that much greater when one's mind has been exercised and thus (presumably) expanded.