Quotes from David Foster Wallace

No! No! Any conversation or interchange is better than none at all, to trust him on this, that the worst kind of gut-wrenching intergenerational interface is better than withdrawal or hiddenness on either side.

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 can just sit there with your hands writhing in your lap and 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.

I have dickered over trinkets with malnourished children. I have learned what it is to become afraid of one's own cabin toilet. I have now heard—and am powerless to describe—reggae elevator music.

we don't take it seriously enough as both a disseminator and a definer of the cultural atmosphere we breathe and process, that many of us are so blinded by constant exposure that we regard TV the way Reagan's lame F.C.C. chairman Mark Fowler professed to see it in 1981, as "just another appliance, a toaster with pictures.

you can't keep the thoughts from popping in there. The thing they try to teach you is just to Let Them Go, the thoughts. Let them come as they will, but do not Entertain them.

all that green just sits in the heat and seethes. Like

tends to put us before the television and its one-way window

The work that interests me is done with a pencil and a sheet of paper. Rarely even a calculator. At the cutting edge of electrical engineering, almost everything interesting is resolved via the manipulation of variables.

We're all terribly, terribly lonely. And there's a way, at least in prose fiction, that can allow you to be intimate with the world and with a mind and with characters that you just can't be in the real world. — David Foster Wallace, interview in Whiskey Island , Spring, 1993.

It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase. It just did it way more well than wisely

My aunt asks again if I'm sure it's no problem and I don't answer because I'm afraid of how my voice will sound.

What Mark Nechtr fears most: solipsistic solipsism: silence.

La belleza no es la meta de los deportes de competición y, sin embargo, los deportes de élite son un vehículo perfecto para la expresión de la belleza humana. La relación que guardan ambas cosas entre sí viene a ser un poco como la que hay entre la valentía y la guerra».

Postmodern irony and cynicism has become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving.

And I'll say that I felt something dark in my heart when my husband almost nudged me there. I felt that it was a sorry business indeed when my own spouse couldn't tell I was being serious. And I told him so.

Television's greatest minute-by-minute appeal is that it engages without demanding. One can rest while undergoing stimulation. Receive without giving.

What put him there, here and now, for you to see, is that he can't be seen. That's what the whole thing's about, now. That no one is really the way they have to be seen.

La Broma Infinita / D. F. Wallace

It's not an accident they're all so white and clean, for they're clearly meant to represent the Calvinist triumph of capital and industry over the primal decay-action of the sea.

My husband laughed without smiling. He looked at the last of the sun-colored water as we approached the Brooklyn Bridge's system of angled shadows. If no one is really the way we see them, that would include me, I said. And you. Rudy admired the sunset. He said it looked explosive, hanging, all round, just over the water. Reflected and doubled in that bit of river. But he was looking only at the water. I saw him.

I'm going to propose that I tell you a joke, Boo, on the condition that afterward you shush and let me sleep.' 'Is it a good one?' 'Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic, and a dyslexic.' 'I give.' 'You get somebody who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog.

My husband laughed without smiling. He looked at the last of the sun-colored water as we approached the Brooklyn Bridge's system of angled shadow. Because if no one is really the way we see them, I said, that would include me. And you. Rudy admired the sunset out loud. He said it looked explosive, hanging, all round, just slightly over the water. Reflected and doubled in that bit of river. But he'd been looking only at the water. I'd watched him.

light sharp bitter tint

L'accettazione della realtà è una fonte di energia in se stessa