Quotes from David Foster Wallace

We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded engagement in the self. Once we've hit this age, we will now give or take anything , wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young.

It's not that students don't "get" Kafka's humor but that we've taught them to see humor as something you get—the same way we've taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That

It is true that doing original math is 'lonely.' But it is also true that professional mathematicians compose a community.

Ma poi un piccolo, silenzioso, educato, profumato, ordinatissimo sistema di nuovi segnali mi ha in qualche modo sparato alla testa. Con le parole e le lacrime lei mi ha amputato qualcosa. Io le avevo donato la mia più intima importanza, e il suo autobus è ripartito, lasciando una qualche parte fondamentale di me dentro di lei come il pungiglione di un'ape. Adesso l'unica cosa che voglio è salire in macchina e andarmene molto lontano, a sanguinare».

As essayist Lewis Hyde points out, self-mocking irony is always Sincerity, with a motive.

Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

Dejó de beber. Eso lo mató. No podía soportarlo, pero lo había prometido

You're in love with a man, says Julie, who insists that he can love you only when you're standing in the exact center of whatever room you're in.

What if we chose to regard the 2,973 innocents killed in the terrorist attacks of 9/11 as heroes and martyrs, 'sacrifices on the altar of freedom'?

What if he was simply ill-suited, the way some people are born without limbs or certain organs? The neurology of failure. What if he was simply born and destined to live in the shadow of Total Fear and Despair, and all his so-called activities were pathetic attempts to distract him from the inevitable?

it was his idea to call having a body Corporeal Punishment)

The sun, if your fluttering eye catches it even slightly, gives you the blue and red floaters a flashbulb gives you.

Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.

Not as rabid a fan as, say, Nicholson Baker, but I do believe that The Poorhouse Fair, Of the Farm, and The Centaur are all great books, maybe classics. And even since '81's Rabbit Is Rich—as his characters seemed to become more and more repellent, and without any corresponding sign that the author understood that they were repellent—

Since pain is a totally subjective mental experience, we do not have direct access to anyone or anything's pain but our own; and even just the principles by which we can infer that others experience pain and have a legitimate interest in not feeling pain involve hard-core philosophy—metaphysics, epistemology, value theory, ethics.

He's never once asked for painful personal details, Mark. He'll take what you give him and just nod. He sees and won't cross uninvited this unbroken center-line between your business and his. Keeps his own counsel. Never ever presses. It's one reason he's so universally loved.

None of the other famous phallocrats of Updike's generation—not Mailer, not Exley or Roth or even Bukowski—excites such violent dislike.

nothing from nature is good or bad. Natural things just are...

Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden

But what it does mean is that McCain2000 wants to have it both ways, rather like big corporations that give to charity and then try to reap PR benefits by hyping their altruism in their ads.

From the inter-Award banter of Mr. Bobby Slayton, professional comedian and master of ceremonies for the 1997 AVNAs: "I know I'm looking good, though, like younger, 'cause I started using this special Grecian Formula—every time I find a gray hair, I fuck my wife in the ass. [No laughter, scattered groans.] Fuck you. That's a great joke. Fuck you.

his foray into the futuristic-dystopic tradition of Huxley and Ballard and soft sci-

I worry that I am driven by a] basically vapid urge to be avant-garde and post structural and linguistically calisthenic. This is why I get very spiny when I think someone's suggesting this may be my root motive and character because I'm afraid it might be.

I went to her for comfort and found her almost hostile. Her eyes were dark and she was silent and trying with every fiber to look Unhappy.