“This American penchant for absolution via irony is foreign to them.” — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“Irony tyrannizes us. All US irony is based on an implicit 'I don't really mean what I'm saying.” — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“The worst thing about irony for me is that it attenuates emotion.” — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“I don't think irony's meant to synergize with anything as heartfelt as sadness.” — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“Show me somebody who really knows what irony means and I’ll show you a bullshit artist.” — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
The reason ... our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“Commercial comedy's often set up to feature an ironist making devastating sport of someone who's naive or sentimental or pretentious or pompous.” — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“I think the main function of contemporary irony is to protect the speaker from being interpreted as naive or sentimental.” — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Such techniques, including meta-discursive stuff, self-reference, irony, black humor, cynicism, grotesquerie and shock, it would be safe to say that television or… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
The real irony is that the view of infinity as some forbidden zone or road to insanity - which view was very… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“Postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“In sum, then a conservative tech writer offers a really attractive way of looking at viewer passivity and TV's institutionalization of irony,… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“Irony and cynicism were just what the U.S. hypocrisy of the fifties and sixties called for. That’s what made the early postmodernists… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“I felt more solidly composed, now that I was horizontal. I was impossible to knock down.” — David Foster Wallace Copy Share
“We all have our little solipsistic delusions, ghastly intuitions of utter singularity: that we are the only one in the house who ever fills… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share
“It's no accident that in a bureaucracy getting fired is called 'termination,' as in ontological erasure.” — David Foster Wallace Copy Share
Footnote: 79) The anchor is gigantic and must weigh a hundred tons, and -- delightfully -- it really is anchor-shaped, i.e. the same shape… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share
“The paradoxical intercourse of audience and celebrity. The suppressed awareness that the whole reason ordinary people found celebrity fascinating was that they were not,… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share
“I am coming to see that the sensation of the worst nightmares, a sensation that can be felt asleep or awake, is identical to… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share
“He cranks the condo’s AC way down at night and still most mornings wakes up soaked, fetally curled, entombed in that kind of psychic… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share
“To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share
“If you’re subjected to enough great salesmen and salespitches and marketing concepts for long enough—like from your earliest Saturday-morning cartoons, let’s say—it is only… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share
“She almost reminds the engineer of certain types in high school whom everyone adored because you sensed it made no difference to them whether… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share
To be, in a word, unborable… It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share
“It is within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share
