“To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention.… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“If, by the virtue of charity or the funded Ennet House, you will acquire many exotic new facts. You will find out… — 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
“true Democratic Spirit is up there with religious faith and emotional maturity and all those other top-of-the-Maslow-Pyramid-type qualities that people spend their… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“That 99 of compulsive thinkers’ thinking is about themselves that 99 of this self-directed thinking consists of imagining and then getting ready… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“If, by the virtue of charity or the circumstance of desperation, you ever chance to spend a little time around a Substance-recovery… — 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
