Quotes About Perspective

And yet this nauseated feeling has come and gone for you in the past, it's passed eventually during prior depressions, Katherine, has it not?' 'But when you're in the feeling you forget. The feeling feels like it's always been there and will always be there, and you forget. It's like this whole filter drops down over the whole way you think about everything, a couple weeks after—

That evil people never believe they are evil, but rather that everyone else is evil.

the man was so cross-eyed he could stand in the middle of the week and see both Sundays.

Something happens to a novel as it ages, but what? It doesn't ripen or deepen in the manner of cheese and wine, and it doesn't fall apart, at least not figuratively. Fiction has no half-life. We age alongside the novels we've read, and only one of us is actively deteriorating. Which is to say that a novel is perishable only by virtue of being stored in such a leaky cask: our heads.

Evil people never believe they are evil, but rather that everyone else is evil.

I was enjoying being one horizontal object in a room filled with horizontality.

Why is the truth usually not just un- but anti- interesting? Because

The jokes theory was there's no audience and no director and no stage or set because, The Mad Stork and his cronies argued, in Reality there are none of these things. And the protagonist doesn't know he's the protagonist in a Found Drama because in Reality nobody thinks they're in any sort of Drama.

The joke's theory was there's no audience and no director and no stage or set because, The Mad Stork and his cronies argued, in Reality there are none of these things. And the protagonist doesn't know he's the protagonist in a Found Drama because in Reality nobody thinks they're in any sort of Drama.

It may well be that we spectators, who are not divinely giftes as athletes, are the only ones truly able to see, articulate and animate the experience of the gift we are denied.

David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace

WE ARE WHAT WE WALK BETWEEN

The fact that twenty years have gone by and we still do not agree what this novel means, or what exactly it was trying to say, despite saying (seemingly) everything about everything, is yet another perfect analogy for the Internet. Both are too big. Both contain too much. Both welcome you in. Both push you away.

Step into the skin and disappear.

It's the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.

That—to cut to a chase which the interviewers' hands-on-hip attitudes and replacement of the lamp's bulb with a much higher wattage signified they'd very much like to see cut to—as

sometimes in the same week. There might even be—though

sentence-by-sentence basis—that it's okay if a person

The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations.

Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness, because it's so socially repulsive, but it's pretty much the same for all of us deep down. It's our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: There is no experience you've had that you were not at the absolute center of.

no matter how smart you thought you were, you are actually way less smart than that.

Here is how to read the monthly E.T.A. and U.S.T.A. and O.N.A.N.T.A. rankings the way Himself read scholars' reviews of his multiple-exposure melodramas. Learn to care and not to care. They mean the rankings to help you determine where you are, not who you are. Memorize your monthly rankings, and forget them. Here is how: never tell anyone where you are.

Marathe shifted in his chair. 'In a case such as this you become the slave who believes he is free.