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Alls - how it's possible even the worst things that can happen to you can end up being positive factors in who you are. By David Foster Wallace
If I'm hanging out with you, I can't even tell whether I like you or not because I'm too worried about whether you like me. By David Foster Wallace
I'm a typical American, half of me is dying to give myself away and the other half is continually rebelling. By David Foster Wallace
...giving me the exact kind of smile of someone who, on Christmas morning, has just unwrapped an expensive present he already owns. By David Foster Wallace
It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art. By David Foster Wallace
Don't ask why if you don't want to die. Do as you're told if you want to get old. By David Foster Wallace
Almost anything that you pay close, direct attention to becomes interesting. By David Foster Wallace
... Being the worst confirmation of the worst kind of generation gap stereotype and parental disgust for their decadent, wastoid kids By David Foster Wallace
[T]o really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help. By David Foster Wallace
It's weird to feel like you miss someone you're not even sure you know. By David Foster Wallace
No more Network reluctance to make a program too entertaining for fear its commercials would pale in comparison. By David Foster Wallace
[The entire text of Infinite Jest.] By David Foster Wallace
I do things like get in a taxi and say, The library, and step on it. By David Foster Wallace
You play right up to your limit and then pass your limit and look back at your former limit and wave a hankie at it, embarking. By David Foster Wallace
I am concentrating docilely on the question why U.S. restrooms always appear to us as infirmaries for public distress, the place to reagain control. By David Foster Wallace
The whole quantum setup ends up being embarrassing in the special way something pretentious is embarrassing when it's also wrong. By David Foster Wallace
As everything becomes bad in you, all the good goes out of the world like air out of a big broken balloon. By David Foster Wallace
Most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking. By David Foster Wallace
Basically the sort of guy who looks entirely at home in sockless white loafers and a mint-green knit shirt from Lacoste. By David Foster Wallace
It's not what you lift, it's where you carry it. By David Foster Wallace
I was looking at my sneakers and making my feet alternately pigeon-toed and then penguin-toed on the bedroom's blue carpet. By David Foster Wallace
It looks like you can write a minimalist piece without much bleeding. And you can. But not a good one. By David Foster Wallace
Actually just has a born tech-science wienie's congenital impatience with the referential murkiness and inelegance of verbal systems. By David Foster Wallace
I'm screaming for help and everybody's acting as if I'm singing Ethel Merman covers ... By David Foster Wallace
We will, of course, without hesitation use art to parody, ridicule, debunk, or criticize ideologiesbut this is very different. By David Foster Wallace
He suddenly felt nothing, or rather Nothing, a pre-tornadic stillness of zero sensation, as if he were the very space he occupied. By David Foster Wallace
He was around where the tree-line bulged herniatically out toward the end of the West Courts' fencing. By David Foster Wallace
It's well-known that an overkeen sense of obligation tends to afflict the congenitally nice. By David Foster Wallace
She smelled of talcum powder and Big Red. By David Foster Wallace
There is no hatred in my love for you. Only a sadness I feel all the more strongly for my inability to explain or describe it. By David Foster Wallace
It's no accident that in a bureaucracy getting fired is called 'termination,' as in ontological erasure. By David Foster Wallace
Look down your shirt and spell attic. By David Foster Wallace
I'd like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time, instead of having to go back in my head and enjoy them. By David Foster Wallace
Talk about solid turds all you want. The molecular integrity of shit is small potatoes. By David Foster Wallace
Don't worry about getting in touch with your feelings, they'll get in touch with you. By David Foster Wallace
It's not that words or human language stop having any meaning or relevance after you die, by the way. By David Foster Wallace
So yo then man what's your story? By David Foster Wallace
Hal finds he rather envies a man who feels he has something to explain his being fucked up, parents to blame it on. By David Foster Wallace
His parents' pregnancies must have been all-out chromosomatic war By David Foster Wallace
The only real significance she had attached to the memory was that it was funny what stuck with you. By David Foster Wallace
David Cronenberg's mainstream Crash comes out of absolutely nowhere to win something called Best Alternative Adult Feature Film. By David Foster Wallace
It would take an architect who could hate enough to feel enough to love enough to perpetrate the kind of special cruelty only real lovers can inflict. By David Foster Wallace
Phoneless Cord in his stocking, ostentatiously packaged, By David Foster Wallace
That a person who did something for somebody's gratitude was more like a 2-D cutout image of a person than a bona fide person. By David Foster Wallace
Junior athletics is but one facet of the real gem: life's endless war against the self you cannot live without. By David Foster Wallace
God and Satan play poker with Tarot cards for the soul of an alcoholic sandwich-bag salesman obsessed with Bernini's 'The Ecstasy of St. Teresa. By David Foster Wallace
I'm awful sorry to bother. I can come back. I was wondering if maybe there was any special Program prayer for when you want to hang yourself. By David Foster Wallace
Once he'd been set off inside, it mattered so much that he was somehow afraid to show how much it mattered. By David Foster Wallace
This is why they started us here so young: to give ourselves away before the age when the questions 'why' and 'to what' grow real beaks and claws. By David Foster Wallace
I am about art here, not simple reproduction. By David Foster Wallace
Because Tavis had been the one to take the lion's share of the heat when it turned out that Blue Jays' spectators in the stands, By David Foster Wallace
That females are capable of being just as vulgar about sexual and eliminatory functions as males. By David Foster Wallace
Defining yourself in opposition to something is still being anaclitic on that thing, isn't it? By David Foster Wallace
If you are an adolescent, here is the trick to being neither quite a nerd nor quite a jock: be no one.It is easier than you think. By David Foster Wallace
It's no coincidence it's the gurus on mountains who're wise. You get to the top: you're already theirs. By David Foster Wallace
This appetite to choose death by pleasure if it is available to choose - this appetite of your people unable to choose appetites, this is the death. By David Foster Wallace
and the tumescence of O.N.A.N.ism. By David Foster Wallace
Chandler Foss is flossing his teeth By David Foster Wallace
Hang me upside-down and fuck me in both ears. You pulled yourself out of a clinical depression by being a freaking hero. By David Foster Wallace
It is extremely difficult to stay alert & attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monolog inside your head. By David Foster Wallace
a manual for how to build a mentally ill child By David Foster Wallace
Mediocrity is contextual. By David Foster Wallace
Their handshake looked, for the first split-second he looked, like C.T. was jacking off and the little girl was going Sieg Heil. By David Foster Wallace
Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever. By David Foster Wallace
One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism. By David Foster Wallace
This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn't engage anybody. By David Foster Wallace
American human beings are a slippery and protean bunch in real life, hard as hell to get any kind of universal handle on. By David Foster Wallace
I just think that fiction that isn't exploring what it means to be human today isn't art. By David Foster Wallace
I think it's easy to stop smoking; it's just hard not to commit a felony after you stop. By David Foster Wallace
Scenery is here. Wish you were beautiful. By David Foster Wallace
The Great White Male is rap's Grand Inquisitor, its idiot questioner, its Alien Other no less than Reds were for McCarthy. By David Foster Wallace
As each person's sandal hits the pier, a sociolinguistic transformation from cruiser to tourist is effected. By David Foster Wallace
She regarded the things that were important to me as her enemy, not realizing that they were, in fact, the "me" she seemed so jealously to covet. By David Foster Wallace
You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice. By David Foster Wallace
Lenz tells Green how once he was at a Halloween party where a hydrocephalic woman wore a necklace made of dead gulls. By David Foster Wallace
We are not dead but asleep, dreaming of ourselves. By David Foster Wallace
Irony and hip ennui are extremely authoritarian. By David Foster Wallace
It always seems to be important to have at least one person in the vicinity to hate. By David Foster Wallace
Yes, I'm paranoid - but am I paranoid enough? By David Foster Wallace
Ideally, each piece of art's its own unique object, and its evaluation's always present-tense. By David Foster Wallace
The teeth of the smile evidenced a clinical depressive's classic inattentionto oral hygiene. By David Foster Wallace
Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden. By David Foster Wallace
Capital T-truth is about life before death. By David Foster Wallace
And her eyes. I cannot say what color Lenore Beadsman's eyes are; I cannot look at them; they are the sun to me. By David Foster Wallace
Other people can often see things about you that you yourself cannot see, even if those people are stupid. By David Foster Wallace
The sky is low and gray and loose and seems to hang. There's something baggy about the sky. By David Foster Wallace
Everything I've ever let go of had claw marks on it. By David Foster Wallace
Gesture a lot and look wild-eyed and generally pissed-off in some broad geopolitical way. By David Foster Wallace
The drunk and the maimed both are dragged forward out of the arena like a boneless Christ, one man under each arm, feet dragging, eyes on the aether. By David Foster Wallace
The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you. By David Foster Wallace
The happy pleasure of the person alone, yes? By David Foster Wallace
The entire ball game, in terms of both the exam and life, was what you gave attention to vs. what you willed yourself to not. By David Foster Wallace
If your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything. By David Foster Wallace
Irony tyrannizes us. All US irony is based on an implicit 'I don't really mean what I'm saying. By David Foster Wallace
Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still. By David Foster Wallace
There's been time this whole time. You can't kill time with your heart. Everything takes time. By David Foster Wallace
so full of himself he could have shit limbs. By David Foster Wallace
I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art. By David Foster Wallace
[I]f the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is. By David Foster Wallace
I knew my limitations and the limitations of the courts I played on, and adjusted thusly. I was at my best in bad conditions. By David Foster Wallace
He just sits there. I want to be like that. Able to just sit all quiet and pull life toward me, one forehead at a time. His name is supposedly Lyle. By David Foster Wallace
The Moms revealed that if you're not crazy then speaking to someone who isn't there is termed apostrophe and is valid art. By David Foster Wallace
MY BABY HAS SIX EYES AND BASICALLY NO SKULL By David Foster Wallace
If an art form is marginalized it's because it's not speaking to people. By David Foster Wallace
I don't want to hurt myself. I want to stop hurting. By David Foster Wallace
Having a lot of money does not immunize people from suffering or fear. By David Foster Wallace
It was made to fail, born to be co-opted and subsumed into the junky ferrywake of media's coaching. By David Foster Wallace
He'd cure himself by excess. By David Foster Wallace
I had kind of a midlife crisis at twenty which probably doesn't augur well for my longevity By David Foster Wallace
Dostoevski informs everybody; or he ought to. By David Foster Wallace
Apeshit has rarely enjoyed so literal a denotation. By David Foster Wallace
The music's still going, going absolutely nowhere, like Philip Glass on Quaaludes. By David Foster Wallace
I felt the sort of soaring, ceilingless tedium that transcends tedium and becomes worry. By David Foster Wallace
Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T true is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. By David Foster Wallace
Worship your body, beauty, and sexual allure and you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. By David Foster Wallace
desire is the sugar in human food. By David Foster Wallace
The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the wall, during the first eight pages. By David Foster Wallace
Commercial comedy's often set up to feature an ironist makingdevastating sport of someone who's naive or sentimental or pretentious orpompous. By David Foster Wallace
Mr. Incandenza, this is the Enfield Raw Sewage Commission, and quite frankly we've had enough shit out of you. By David Foster Wallace
The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die. By David Foster Wallace
I love the way you love, but I hate the way I'm supposed to love you back. By David Foster Wallace
Feral hamsters are not pets. They mean business. By David Foster Wallace
Here is how to handle being a feral prodigy. By David Foster Wallace
When a solipsist dies ... everything goes with him. By David Foster Wallace
Rap's conscious response to the poverty and oppression of U.S. blacks is like some hideous parody of sixties black pride. By David Foster Wallace
You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. By David Foster Wallace
Insects all business all the time. By David Foster Wallace
People, unless they're paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority. By David Foster Wallace
Who teaches your U.S.A. children how to choose their temple? What to love enough not to think two times? By David Foster Wallace
Devils are actually angels. By David Foster Wallace
I had, by thirteen, developed a sort of Taoist hubris about my ability to control via non-control. By David Foster Wallace
God - unless you're Charlton Heston, or unhinged, or both - speaks and acts entirely through the vehicle of human beings, if there is a God. By David Foster Wallace
God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. By David Foster Wallace
Johnny Gentle, the first U.S. President ever to swing his microphone around by the cord during his Inauguration speech. By David Foster Wallace
There's good self-consciousness, and then there's toxic, paralyzing, raped-by-psychic-Bedouins self-consciousness. By David Foster Wallace
If you've never wept and want to, have a child. By David Foster Wallace
...a harried commuter is mistaken for Christ by a child he knocks over. By David Foster Wallace
I think I was very often bored as a child, but boredom is not what I knew it as - what I knew was that I worried a lot By David Foster Wallace
He was trying to pay close attention to his surroundings as a way to avert thought and anxiety. By David Foster Wallace
The best way to describe the sonic environment at the '98 CES is:Imagine that the apocalypse took the form of a cocktail party. By David Foster Wallace
My fingers are mated into a mirrored series of what manifests, to me, as the letter X. By David Foster Wallace
The individual's right to pursue his own vision of the best ration of pleasure to pain: utterly sacrosanct. By David Foster Wallace
This is so stupid it practically drools. By David Foster Wallace
Bain's view was always that C.T. By David Foster Wallace
I don't think irony's meant to synergize with anything as heartfelt assadness. By David Foster Wallace
She wanted only tall smooth bottles whose labels spoke of Proof. By David Foster Wallace
There's more to life than sitting there interfacing, it might bea newsflash to you. By David Foster Wallace
The fun of reading as "an exchange between consciousnesses, a way for human beings to talk to each other about stuff we can't normally talk about." By David Foster Wallace
My father's mood surrounded him like a field and affected any room he occupied, like an odor or a certain cast to the light. By David Foster Wallace
They covet a vision of themselves as witnesses. By David Foster Wallace
Aloft, intoned the damaged man. By David Foster Wallace
And when he came to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out. By David Foster Wallace
Abstruse dullness is actually a much more effective shield than is secrecy. By David Foster Wallace
Tornadoes were, in out part of Central Illinois, the dimensionless point at which parallel lines met and whirled and blew up. They made no sense. By David Foster Wallace
For reasons that are not well understood, war's codes are safer for most of us than love's. By David Foster Wallace
Every love story is a ghost story. By David Foster Wallace
Tell them there are no holes for your fingers in the masks of men. Tell them how could you ever even hope to love what you can't grab onto. By David Foster Wallace
If you worship power, you will feel weak and afraid, needing ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay By David Foster Wallace
You can be at certain parties and not really be there. By David Foster Wallace
Naive people are, more or less by definition, unaware that they're naive. By David Foster Wallace
One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he's really lonely for By David Foster Wallace
It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames. By David Foster Wallace
you do not have to like a person in order to learn from him/her/it. That By David Foster Wallace
You believe you would die twice for another but in truth would die only for your alone self, its sentiment. By David Foster Wallace
In life, the microphone passes your lips but once ... you had better be ready to sing. By David Foster Wallace
I mean, Tarantino is such a SHMUCK 90 percent of the time. But ten percent of the time, I've seen genius shining off the guy. By David Foster Wallace
Sounds kind of ad hoc and jerry-rigged and haphazard.' 'Everybody's a critic. This wasn't an aesthetic endeavor. By David Foster Wallace
Who would die for this chance to be fed this death of pleasure with spoons, in their warm homes, alone, unmoving? By David Foster Wallace
That everybody's sneeze sounds different. By David Foster Wallace
The drowned panic of not being able to ask questions or have any input into what somebody's saying is so awful it sort of dwarfs the pain. By David Foster Wallace
The trees' bony fingers make spell-casting gestures in the wind as they pass. By David Foster Wallace
Just the thought of getting up made me glad I was lying on the floor. By David Foster Wallace
Her expression is from Page 18 of the Victoria's Secret catalogue. By David Foster Wallace
the man was so cross-eyed he could stand in the middle of the week and see both Sundays. By David Foster Wallace
When he settles in with the tray and cartridge, the TP's viewer's digital display reads 1927h. By David Foster Wallace
I believe I want adult sanity, which seems to me the only unalloyed form of heroism available today. By David Foster Wallace
The boot, which was dull black and square-heeled, the motorcycle boot of persons who did not own motorcycles but wore the boots of those who did. By David Foster Wallace
De Tocqueville's thrust is that it's in the democratic citizen's nature to be like a leaf that doesn't believe in the tree it's part of. By David Foster Wallace
To try and forget, rasa the tabula, wipe the memory totally out, numb it with opiates. By David Foster Wallace
Some answer or trick of the will: the ability not to think about it. What if everyone knew this trick but Claude Sylvanshine? By David Foster Wallace
Perversely, it is often more fun to want something than to have it. By David Foster Wallace
The other half is to dramatize that we still 'are' human beings, now. Or can be. By David Foster Wallace
The inactive viewer's screen is the color of way out over the Atlantic looking straight down on a cold day. By David Foster Wallace
This American penchant for absolution via irony is foreign to them. By David Foster Wallace
And he can feel his heart going out into the world ... By David Foster Wallace
I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader. By David Foster Wallace
Fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being. By David Foster Wallace
That something smelled delicious!' I screamed. By David Foster Wallace
Still, though.""Right. Exactly. By David Foster Wallace
The truth is that there's no difference between a life and a story? But a life pretends to be something more? But it really isn't more? LENORE: By David Foster Wallace
I find in myself a need to get very away. By David Foster Wallace
Expectant. My chest bumps like a dryer with shoes in it. I compose what I project will be seen as a By David Foster Wallace
The severing of an established connection is exponentially more painful than the rejection of an attempted connection. By David Foster Wallace
Breasts are uniformly zeppelinesque and in various perilous stages of semiconfinement. By David Foster Wallace
Do not underestimate objects. By David Foster Wallace
Our leaders, our government is us, all of us, so if they're venal and weak it's because we are. By David Foster Wallace
Greater when one's mind has been exercised and thus By David Foster Wallace
-you can prove that there are exactly as many real numbers between 0 and 1 as between 0 and any other finite number you can think of. By David Foster Wallace
I'm so scared of dying without ever being really seen. By David Foster Wallace
So which is the lie? Hard or soft? Silence or time? By David Foster Wallace
People hate people, not freedom. By David Foster Wallace
And just before 0145h. on 2 April Y.D.A.U., his wife arrived back home By David Foster Wallace
Two clocks, two ghosts, one square acre of hidden mirror. By David Foster Wallace
He had never been so anxious for the arrival of a woman he did not want to see. By David Foster Wallace
But from special it's not very far to Alone. By David Foster Wallace
Act in Haste, Repent at Leisure would seem to have been almost custom-designed for the case of tattoos. By David Foster Wallace
Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself. By David Foster Wallace
Fictionally speaking, desire is the sugar in human food. By David Foster Wallace
You know those mass-market cartridges, for the masses? The ones that are so bad they're somehow perversely good? This was worse than that. By David Foster Wallace
A "game" that will give everyone the consoling impression of making contact, together, with the ultimate transcendent referent. By David Foster Wallace
The modern woman's a mess of contradictions that they lay on themselves that drives them nuts. By David Foster Wallace
Not sexy so much as angelic, like all the world's light had gotten together and arranged itself into the shape of a face. By David Foster Wallace
Hell hath no fury like a coolly received postmodernist. By David Foster Wallace
The kid has no idea he even knows something's wrong By David Foster Wallace
A thing among things, its self's soul so much vapor aloft, falling as rain and then rising, the sun up and down like a yoyo. By David Foster Wallace
My chest bumps like a dryer with shoes in it. By David Foster Wallace
That you do not have to like a person in order to learn from him/her/it. By David Foster Wallace
I felt more solidly composed, now that I was horizontal. I was impossible to knock down. By David Foster Wallace
In a nation whose great informing myth is that it has no great informing myth, familiarity equaled timelessness By David Foster Wallace
There was always something disappointing about clouds when you were inside them; they ceased to be clouds at all. It just got really foggy. By David Foster Wallace
people who feel that fiction should be easy to read, that it's a popular medium By David Foster Wallace
I like the fans' sound at night. Do you? It's like somebody big far away goes like: it'sOKit'sOKit'sOKit'sOK, over and over. From very far away. By David Foster Wallace
Existence and life break people in all kinds of awful fucking ways all the time. By David Foster Wallace
Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move. By David Foster Wallace
Good writing isn't a science. It's an art, and the horizon is infinite. You can always get better. By David Foster Wallace
I'm just afraid of having a tombstone that says HERE LIES A PROMISING OLD MAN. By David Foster Wallace
really do do this, By David Foster Wallace
The man who knows his limitations, has none. By David Foster Wallace
Irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It's critical and destructive, a ground-clearing By David Foster Wallace
The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. By David Foster Wallace
And Lo, for the Earth was empty of Form, and void. And Darkness was all over the Face of the Deep. And We said: 'Look at that fucker Dance. By David Foster Wallace
The worst thing about irony for me is that it attenuates emotion. By David Foster Wallace
For me, art that's alive and urgent is about what it is to be a human being. By David Foster Wallace
Why do prostitutes when they get straight always try and get so prim? It's like long-repressed librarian-ambitions come flooding out. By David Foster Wallace
It's probably hard to feel any sort of Romantic spiritual connection to nature when you have to make your living from it. By David Foster Wallace
Some days you can almost see Hal like flit in and out of a match, like some part of him leaves and hovers and then comes back. By David Foster Wallace
To be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I'm scared about how sappy this'll look in print, saying this. By David Foster Wallace
Trying to be anti-cool is just one exponent off trying to be cool it's the same beast. By David Foster Wallace
It's like a fugue of evaded responsibility. By David Foster Wallace
Believe what you want. I'm powerless over what you believe. By David Foster Wallace
One paradox of professional writing is that books written solely for money and/or acclaim will almost never be good enough to garner either. By David Foster Wallace
It's the digitals. Leith has that word he uses for the shift from analogs to digitals. That word he uses about eleven times an hour. By David Foster Wallace
You must have been traumatized beyond fucking belief By David Foster Wallace
every failure is also a victory. By David Foster Wallace
Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. By David Foster Wallace
great big huge titties By David Foster Wallace
The doctor gazed at her with a patience she was meant to see. By David Foster Wallace
We're going to reinvent not just government but history. Torch the past. By David Foster Wallace
It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase. By David Foster Wallace
Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you. By David Foster Wallace
We're not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader's own life 'outside' the story changes the story. By David Foster Wallace
To be, in a word, unborable ... It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish By David Foster Wallace
Sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them. By David Foster Wallace
A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane. By David Foster Wallace
in winter's watered-down light - just By David Foster Wallace
Had numerous pairs of dress chinos and blue blazers and Topsiders, and a smile that looked as though someone had plugged him in. By David Foster Wallace
PS: Allston rules! By David Foster Wallace
The jet's movement and trail seem incisionish, as if white meat behind the blue were exposed and widening in the wake of the blade. By David Foster Wallace
(on Updike) Has the son of a bitch ever had one unpublished thought? By David Foster Wallace
manufacturer or Dr. By David Foster Wallace
Life is like tennis. Those who serve best usually win. By David Foster Wallace
I balked at trying antidepressants, I just couldn't see myself taking pills to try to be less of a fraud. By David Foster Wallace
I have pointed rhythmically at the ceiling to the two-four beat of the same disco music I hated pointing at the ceiling to in 1977. By David Foster Wallace
This was depressing, much the way discovering that somebody is easy to manipulate is always a little depressing. By David Foster Wallace
It seems significant that we don't want things to be quiet, ever, anymore. By David Foster Wallace
Sentence-by-sentence basis - that it's okay if a person By David Foster Wallace
Headers from the last few great daily papers, By David Foster Wallace
It is unimaginably hard to do this - to live consciously, adultly, day in and day out. By David Foster Wallace
Pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. per se. By David Foster Wallace
Cornell University Press announced plans for a festschrift. By David Foster Wallace
That what appears to be egoism so often isn't. By David Foster Wallace
I wish you way more than luck. By David Foster Wallace
Words and a book and a belief that the world is words ... By David Foster Wallace
There are exactly as many R.L.-points in [0,1] as there are in [0,2]. By David Foster Wallace
This argument is not the barrel of drugged trout that Methodological Descriptivism was, but it's still vulnerable to objections. By David Foster Wallace
Most of us will still take nihilism over neanderthalism. By David Foster Wallace
I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it. By David Foster Wallace
It's so nice to be able to end a sentence with a preposition when it's easier. By David Foster Wallace
Does somebody have an explanation why there's human flesh on the hall window upstairs? By David Foster Wallace
Wolf-Spiders Ruleth the Land By David Foster Wallace
She was terrified of everything, and terrified to show it. By David Foster Wallace
The assumption that you everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism. By David Foster Wallace
The encaged and suicidal have a really hard time imagining anyone caring passionately about anything. By David Foster Wallace
That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. By David Foster Wallace
Why is the truth usually not just un- but anti-interesting? By David Foster Wallace
Nothing brings you together like a common enemy. By David Foster Wallace
I'd tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear By David Foster Wallace
Mathematical thinking is abstract, but it's also thoroughly private-sector and results-oriented. By David Foster Wallace
Nothing from nature is good or bad. Natural things just are ... By David Foster Wallace
Another thing he laid in when he'd committed himself to one last marijuana vacation was petroleum jelly. By David Foster Wallace
There are secrets within secrets, thoughalways. By David Foster Wallace
I'm very bright, but I'm terrified of sounding like someone who thinks he's very bright-because those people are assholes. By David Foster Wallace
Hamsters being notorious draggers and rearrangers of stuff they can't eat but feel compelled to fuck with anyway, somehow - and By David Foster Wallace
Te Occidere Possunt Sed Te Edere Non Possunt Nefas Est" ("They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier"). By David Foster Wallace
The people to be most frightened of are the people who are the most frightened. By David Foster Wallace
Entertainment provides relief. Art provokes engagement. By David Foster Wallace
What I know about auto racing could be inscribed with a dry Magic Marker on the lip of a Coke bottle. By David Foster Wallace
The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates. By David Foster Wallace
Do this: hate him for me after I die. I beg you. Dying request. By David Foster Wallace
For these cultures, getting rid of the pain without addressing the deeper cause would be like shutting off a fire alarm while the fire's still going. By David Foster Wallace
The air-conditioning was more like a vague gesture toward the abstract idea of air-conditioning. By David Foster Wallace
Be on guard. The road widens, and many of the detours are seductive. By David Foster Wallace
Sometimes in the same week. There might even be - though By David Foster Wallace
What TV is extremely good at - and realize that this is "all it does" - is discerning what large numbers of people think they want, and supplying it. By David Foster Wallace
The air over the table like the sparkling space just above a fresh-poured seltzer. By David Foster Wallace
You decide. You be the judge. It says You are welcome regardless of severity. Severity is in the eye of the sufferer, it says. Pain is pain. By David Foster Wallace
Francophones are never impressed that anyone else can speak French. By David Foster Wallace
Why not? Why not? Why not not, then, if the best reasoning you can contrive is why not? By David Foster Wallace
I think the main function of contemporary irony is to protect thespeaker from being interpreted as naive or sentimental. By David Foster Wallace
If you're poor old Mario Incandenza you take your competitive strokes where you can find them. By David Foster Wallace
Is it showing off if you hate it? By David Foster Wallace
Untitled. Unfinished. UNRELEASED By David Foster Wallace
a quick intelligence he squanders on an insatiable need to advance some impression of himself - that By David Foster Wallace
The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush. By David Foster Wallace
My ambitions at this point are modest and mostly surround staying alive. By David Foster Wallace
Cleverness as opposed to wisdom. Wanting and having instead of thinking and making. By David Foster Wallace
My bones are ringing the way sometimes people say their ears are ringing, I'm so tired. By David Foster Wallace
I am not what you see and hear. -Hal By David Foster Wallace
Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere Mary went, the lights became erratic. By David Foster Wallace
Let's not sit around and give each other hand-jobs. By David Foster Wallace
It may, after all, be alright to do something scary without thinking, but not when the scariness is the not thinking itself. By David Foster Wallace
Dieting makes me want to murder everyone around me. By David Foster Wallace
The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations. By David Foster Wallace
Rhythms are relations between what you believe and what you believed before. By David Foster Wallace
You have wondered perhaps, why all real accountants wear hats? They are today's cowboys By David Foster Wallace
The fraud part of me was always there, just as a puzzle piece, objectively speaking, is a true piece of the puzzle even before you see how it fits. By David Foster Wallace
So my offense is what, misdemeanor gargling? By David Foster Wallace
Genuine pathological openness is about as seductive as Tourette's Syndrome. By David Foster Wallace
Aren't there parts of ourselves that are just better left unfed? By David Foster Wallace
If you really look at something, you can almost always tell what type of wage structure the person who made it was on. By David Foster Wallace
His eyes were holes in the world. By David Foster Wallace
[Uncentering the Earth] itself is uncentering in the best possible way. Vollmann is one of the deepest, most fully ensouled writers alive. By David Foster Wallace
Ortho Stice played with a kind of rigid, liquid grace, like a panther in a back-brace. By David Foster Wallace
The most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. By David Foster Wallace
I am not what you see and hear. By David Foster Wallace
Would that we scrutinized our technology the way we do our people. By David Foster Wallace
Truly decent, innocent people can be taxing to be around. By David Foster Wallace
Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear. By David Foster Wallace
That no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable. By David Foster Wallace
What's unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. What his head could report to him, looking over and ahead and reporting. By David Foster Wallace
I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies. By David Foster Wallace
Hal loathes sky-and-cloud wallpaper because it makes him feel high-altitude and disoriented and sometimes plummeting. By David Foster Wallace
It takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak. By David Foster Wallace
Word inflation ... Bigger and better. Good greater greatest totally great. Hyperbolic and hyperbolicker. Like grade-inflation. By David Foster Wallace
The reason ... our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. By David Foster Wallace
Not real bright - she thought the figure he'd trace without thinking on her bare flank after sex was the numeral 8, to give you an idea. By David Foster Wallace
I will probably write an hour a day and spend eight hours a day biting my knuckle and worrying about not writing. By David Foster Wallace
You're wearing that bow tie, after all. Isn't that rather an invitation to a young sir? By David Foster Wallace
What fire dies when you feed it? By David Foster Wallace
You Can't Unring a Bell. By David Foster Wallace
The library, and step on it! By David Foster Wallace
Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else. By David Foster Wallace
Describe-the-sort-of-man-you-find-attractive-and-I'll-affect-the-demeanor-of-that-sort-of-man By David Foster Wallace
Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed, By David Foster Wallace
I think serious art is supposed to make us confront things that are difficult in ourselves and in the world. By David Foster Wallace
There is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. By David Foster Wallace
The people who are rebelling meaningfully don't buy a lot of stuff. By David Foster Wallace
The integrity of my sleep has been forever compromised, sir. By David Foster Wallace
You have decided being scared is caused mostly by thinking. By David Foster Wallace
How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it's just words. By David Foster Wallace
The great myth is that the bad ones don't last long. By David Foster Wallace
Everything I've ever let go of has claw marks on it. By David Foster Wallace
Perhaps this is what it means to go mad: to be emptied and to be aware of the emptiness. By David Foster Wallace
Life is essentially one long search for an ashtray. By David Foster Wallace
The sun would leave my sky if I couldn't assume you'd simply come and tell me you were sad. By David Foster Wallace
Just thoroughgoingly nasty and sick. By David Foster Wallace
She had a brainy girls discomfort about her own beauty and its effects on folks. By David Foster Wallace
That evil people never believe they are evil, but rather that everyone else is evil. By David Foster Wallace
The placid hopelessness of adulthood. The complex regret. By David Foster Wallace
It is a fact of life that certain people are corrosive to others' self esteem simply as a function of who and what they are. By David Foster Wallace
[T]he worst kind of nihilist - the kind who isn't even aware he's a nihilist. By David Foster Wallace
And it never even occurs to them their certainty that they are different is what makes them the same. By David Foster Wallace
Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies. By David Foster Wallace
Sometimes what's important is dull. Sometimes it's work. Sometimes the important things aren't works of art for your entertainment, X. By David Foster Wallace
Show me somebody who really knows what irony means and I'll show you a bullshit artist. By David Foster Wallace
Tends to put us before the television and its one-way window By David Foster Wallace
Material possession is one thing, but ideological passion disgusts us on some deep level. By David Foster Wallace
If Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it. By David Foster Wallace
What fire dies when you feed it? It By David Foster Wallace
She took a sort of abject pride in her mecilessness toward herself. By David Foster Wallace
The excessively but not necessarily lycanthropically hirsute By David Foster Wallace
Kid, sobriety's like a hard-on; the minute you get it, you want to fuck with it. By David Foster Wallace
I am in here. Three By David Foster Wallace
Babies are famous to themselves. By David Foster Wallace
diphthongs. Avril By David Foster Wallace
The reasons that center on others are easy to manipulate. All hollow things are light. By David Foster Wallace
Good literature makes your head throb heartlike By David Foster Wallace
And so but anyway By David Foster Wallace
Certain things not only can't be taught but can be retarded by other stuff that can be taught. By David Foster Wallace
For whom is the Funhouse a house? By David Foster Wallace
It is named the "Web" for good reason. By David Foster Wallace
The difference between homicide and suicide is mostly a matter of where you perceive the door top to the cage to be. By David Foster Wallace
That no matter how smart you thought you were, you are actually way less smart than that. By David Foster Wallace
Fiction's about what it is to be a human being. By David Foster Wallace
There are very few innocent sentences in writing. By David Foster Wallace
A president views, interviews, and reviews everything he presides over, if he's doing his job in the correct manner. By David Foster Wallace
Please learn the pragmatics of expressing fear: sometimes words that seem to express really invoke.This can be tricky. By David Foster Wallace
I have filled 3 Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me. By David Foster Wallace
We're a family that takes its home entertainment very seriously. By David Foster Wallace
We think of ourselves now as eaters of the pie instead of makes of the pie ... Corporations make the pie. They make it and we eat it. By David Foster Wallace
The world divides into those who like the managed induction of terror and those who don't. I do not find terror exciting. I find it terrifying. By David Foster Wallace
No horror on earth or elsewhere could equal watching your own offspring open his mouth and have nothing come out. By David Foster Wallace
It never once occurs to him, though, that the reason he's so unhappy is that he's an asshole. By David Foster Wallace
Authors are monkeys who mean By David Foster Wallace
Sometimes words that seem to express really invoke. By David Foster Wallace
I am also concerned not to come off as shrill or preachy when what I really am is more like confused. By David Foster Wallace
The sun like a sneaky keyhole view of hell. By David Foster Wallace
No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories. By David Foster Wallace
This is so American, man: either make something your god and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it. By David Foster Wallace
Sometimes what's important is dull. By David Foster Wallace
Booboo, we've been over this. I can't be asleep if we're talking. By David Foster Wallace
Sometimes he finds out he believes something that he doesn't even know he believed until it exits his mouth By David Foster Wallace
Masturbating but did not. He didn't reject the idea so much By David Foster Wallace
To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people. By David Foster Wallace
The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness. By David Foster Wallace
Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else. By David Foster Wallace
You get to decide what to worship. By David Foster Wallace
There is about world-class athletes carving out exemptions from physical laws a transcendent beauty that makes manifest God in man. By David Foster Wallace
It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most 'familiarity' is meditated and delusive. By David Foster Wallace
...logical validity is not a guarantee of truth. By David Foster Wallace
Bilateral illusion of unilateral attention By David Foster Wallace
There's a weird kind of paradox that the more expensive the vacation is, the more potentially anxiety-producing it is. By David Foster Wallace
...loneliness is not a function of solitude. By David Foster Wallace
The point of books is to combat loneliness. By David Foster Wallace
...morning is the soul's night. By David Foster Wallace
