Quotes from David Foster Wallace

un gran porcentaje de las cosas de las que suelo estar automáticamente seguro resultan ser completamente erróneas y fruto de engañarme a mí mismo.

It's painful to believe that the would-be "public servants" you're forced to choose between are all phonies whose only real concern is their own care and feeding and who will lie so outrageously and with such a straight face that you know they've just got to believe you're an idiot. So who wouldn't yawn and turn away, trade apathy and cynicism for the hurt of getting treated with contempt?

If his young companions have their own special delusions—D.L.'s that cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive, Sternberg's that a body is a prison and not a shelter—Mark's is that he's the only person in the world who feels like the only person in the world. It's a solipsistic delusion.

Lyndon cannot, he insists, for the life of him understand why new generations such as your own see everything of importance in terms of love, David. As if it explained feelings lasting years, that word.

Ser imune ao tédio... É a chave da vida moderna. Se você não se deixar vencer pelo tédio, não existe nada, literalmente, que você não possa conquistar.

It's hard to get good answers to why Young Voters are so uninterested in politics. This is probably because it's next to impossible to get someone to think hard about why he's not interested in something. The boredom itself preempts inquiry; the fact of the feeling's enough.

Dostoevsky is also fun. His novels almost always have ripping good plots, lurid and intricate and thoroughly dramatic. There are murders and attempted murders and police and dysfunctional-family feuding and spies, tough guys and beautiful fallen women and unctuous con men and wasting illnesses and sudden inheritances and silky villains and scheming and whores.

The expression on J.D.'s face is ingenious, already makes you feel deprived not being there with them. We're late, D.L. says, returning and immediately clinging to Mark in a way you can't tell if he minds.

He told me he wants to write this book arguing that Christianity is the universe's way of punishing itself, that what Christianity is, really, is the offer of an irresistible reward in exchange for an unperformable service.

This kind of fiction doesn't interest me.

Sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and hurt.

Formal writing does not mean gratuitously fancy writing; it means clear, clean, maximally considerate writing.

The long cigarette seemed almost to be bleeding smoke, the sunlight on the couch was so bright.

emergence of the depressed person's Inner Child and a cathartic tantrum

It was true Advils looked just like little brown M&M's. Motrin, in the right light, were SweetTarts. A band of MAO inhibitor called Nardil looked just like the tiny round Red Hots we'd all eaten as children.

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

the detumescence of a nipple scraped in shimmy by cotton

So basically they're just standing around, as people will, their luggage a vivid jumble at their feet, kind of bogged down, tired, with that so-near-and-yet type of tension, a sense of somewhere definite they must be at by a definite time, but no clear consensus on how to get there. Since they're late. As Dr. Ambrose might venture to observe, they're figuratively unsure about where to go from here .

Nipples like pencil erasers, hard and corrective against wide shallow breasts whose broad curves I know like the Lake's own tired sweep.

Scegli in cosa credere, la vera libertà è la consapevolezza del reale.

The East-Coast existential treat is thus some escape from confines and stimuli—silence, rustic vistas that hold still, a turning inward: Away. Not so in the rural Midwest. Here you're pretty much Away all the time. The land here is big. Pool-table flat. Horizons in every direction.

There are no atheists in foxy holes.

The Deliverer-Hero, with a Weapon, on a Horse?' says Mark. 'The tough but loving tutor who tempers him like fine blue steel? The Bush? Kinobe? Yoda?

a fit of uncontrollable and pollenated sneezing had reared up out of the dusty land its own self and overtook a tired, tattered Chuck Nunn Junior there at breakfast, at the table, and how to Glory's combined horror and pathos he'd sneezed his keen but tiny eyes right out into his bowl of shredded wheat, and milk and fiber covered his sight, and Glory Joy'd rushed over to his sides but he was already up, horrified and swinging the balls, the twin cords the color of innards...