Quotes from David Foster Wallace

Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed

Estas mañanas peores con suelos fríos y ventanas calientes y luz despiadada...con la certidumbre en el alma de que ese día no será atravesado sino más bien escalado verticalmente que cuando al final vaya a dormir será otra vez como si cayera desde algún sitio alto y escarpado.

We're all on each other's food chain. All of us. It's an individual sport. Welcome to the meaning of individual. We're each deeply alone here. It's what we all have in common, this aloneness.

By week's end, when we'd had all manner of weather, I finally saw what it was about heavy seas and marvelous rest: in heavy seas you feel rocked to sleep, with the windows' spume a gentle shushing, the engines' throb a mother's pulse.

Americans seemed no longer united so much by common beliefs as by common images: what binds us became what we stand witness to.

Sometimes what's important is dull.

An unpopular apres-garde filmmaker (Watt) either suffers a temporal lobe seizure and becomes mute or else is the victim of everyone else's delusion that his (Watt's) temporal lobe seizure has left him mute.

a harried commuter is mistaken for Christ by a child he knocks over.

Le graduatorie servono a farvi capire a che punto siete, non chi siete. Memorizzate il vostro piazzamento mensile, poi dimenticatelo.

That you can all of a sudden out of nowhere want to get high with your Substance so bad that you think you will surely die if you don't, and but you can just sit there with your hands writhing in your lap and your face wet with craving, can want to get high but instead just sit there, wanting to but not, if that makes sense, and if you can gut it out and not hit the Substance during the craving the craving will eventually pass, it will go away—at least for a while.

A like N.B. that Ewell ends up inserting under the heading Biker is that every professional tattooist everybody who can remember getting their tattoos remembers getting them from was, from the sound of everybody's general description, a Biker.

It takes a big man to laugh at himself, but it takes an even bigger man to laugh at that man.

there was actually nothing, and /you/ were nothing, and it was all a delusion. And that you were better than everyone else because you saw that it was a delusion, and yet you were worse because you couldn't function.

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:

Ä°ki genç bal?k,beraberce suda yüzüyormuÅŸ. Kar??dan gelen yaÅŸl?ca bir bal??a rastlam??lar;yaÅŸl?ca bal?k onlara bir baÅŸ selam? vererek ÅŸöyle demiÅŸ:Günayd?n çocuklar.Su nas?l? Genç bal?klar yüzmeye devam etmiÅŸ ama bir süre sonra biri diÄŸerine dönüp sormuÅŸ:Su da neyin nesi?

about how she had seemingly overnight suffered a sudden and anomalous gigantism in her right breast, which she referred to as a titty; she had an almost parodic Québecois accent and described the 'titty's' presenting history and possible diagnoses for almost twenty minutes before I was rolled away.

And a funny thing happens. The man begins to like the Thermos woman. Not love, but like, which is something the man has never experienced before, and finds different, because it involves directing a lot more emotional attention to the actual other person than the old uncontrollable passionate love had involved, involves caring about the whole other person, including the facets and features that have nothing whatsoever to do with the man.

What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves. They've got their own vision, their own way of fracturing reality, and that if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.

Sometimes what's important is dull. Sometimes it's work. Sometimes the important things aren't works of art for your entertainment, X.

Certe cose non solo non possono essere insegnate, ma possono essere ritardate da altre cose che invece possono essere insegnate

you are excused from doing the work of constructing the fantasy. The ads do it for you. The ads, therefore, don't flatter your adult agency, or even ignore it—they supplant it.

The teeth of the smile evidenced a clinical depressive's classic inattention to oral hygiene.

Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere that Mary went, the lights became erratic.

For me, art that's alive and urgent is about what it is to be a human being.