Quotes from David Foster Wallace

With words and tears, she has amputated something from me. I gave her the intimate importance of me, and her bus pulled away, leaving something key of mine inside her like the weapon of a bee. All I want to do now is drive very away, to bleed.

we get old like animals. We get claws, the shape of our face is the shape of our skull, our lips retreat back from big teeth like we're baring to snarl. Sharp, snarling, old: who should wonder at how nobody cares if I hurt, except another snarler?

Because we ceased long ago to be enough apart for a love to span any distance.

Tell them there are no holes for your fingers in the masks of men. Tell them how could you even hope to love what you can't grab onto.

You are so crushed and revolted. You become a lesbian

because the technology is going to get better and better, and it's going to get easier and easier and more and more convenient and more pleasurable to sit alone with images on a screen given to us by people who do not love us but want our money . . that's fine, in low doses, but if it's the basic main staple of your diet, you're going to die. In a very meaningful way, you're going to die.

Everything I've ever let go of has claw marks in it.

You are in love with a man", says Julie, "who insists that he can love you only when you stand in the exact center of whatever room you are in

Perversamente, a menudo es más divertido querer algo que poseerlo

well-trained viewer becomes even more allergic to people. Lonelier. Joe B.'s exhaustive TV-training in how to worry about how he might come across, seem to watching eyes, makes genuine human encounters even scarier.

El odio que se siente por el trabajo al final del día no es más que una parte del trabajo

Chesterton above is wrong in one respect. Or at least imprecise. The danger he's trying to name is not logic. Logic is just a method, and methods can't unhinge people. What Chesterton's really trying to talk about is one of logic's main characteristics—and mathematics'. Abstractness. Abstraction.

He knows, now, that nearly everything you call yours in the world can be taken away from you by other people, assuming that they want it enough.

Television," after all, literally means "seeing far";

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

es la libertad que entraña la verdadera educación, el aprender a ser equilibrado: que puedes decidir conscientemente qué tiene sentido y qué no lo tiene. Puedes decidir a qué dioses adorar…

The dreads and dangers of abstract thinking are a big reason why we now all like to stay so busy and bombarded with stimuli all the time. Abstract thinking tends most often to strike during moments of quiet repose.

In America, we think of rebellion as this very sexy thing that involves action and force and looks good.

Fear and desire are already married. Freely. One's impaled the other since B.C. What you're scared of has always been what moved you. And where you're heading has always been your real end - your desire.

STREITFELD: Scared is a word that you often used to describe yourself. WALLACE: Writers tend to be shy, bookish people. We're always on the fringes of the party, resenting the attention paid to others. And then finally when attention is paid to you, it is great and yet part of it sucks you liver out. Deep down it was the thing you always felt would make everything OK, and then you get it, and find everything isn't OK, and you're still scared.

Probablemente lo más peligroso que tiene la educación académica, por lo menos en mi caso, es que habilita mi tendencia a intelectualizar las cosas en exceso, a perderme en el pensamiento abstracto en lugar de limitarme a prestar atención a lo que está pasando delante de mí. Y en lugar de prestar atención a lo que está pasando dentro de mí.

Elige tu templo de fanatismo con suma atención. Lo que vosotros quisierais cantar como amor trágico es un vínculo mal elegido. ¿Morir por una persona? Eso es una locura. Las personas cambian, se van, mueren, enferman. Se marchan, mienten, enloquecen, enferman, te traicionan, mueren. Vuestra nación os sobrevive. Una causa os sobrevive

Tiene que ver con el verdadero valor de una verdadera educación, que no pasa por las notas ni los títulos y sí en gran medida por la simple conciencia: la conciencia de algo que es tan real y tan esencial, y que está tan oculto delante mismo de nuestras narices y por todas partes, que nos vemos obligados a recordarnos a nosotros mismos una y otra vez: «Esto es agua».

Mathematical thinking is abstract, but it's also thoroughly private-sector and results-oriented. The difference between a brilliant, revolutionary mathematical theory and a wacko one lies, therefore, in what-all can be done with it, in whether or not it yields significant results.