Almost anything that you pay close, direct attention to becomes interesting. — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself. — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
People, unless they're paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority. — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
The entire ball game, in terms of both the exam and life, was what you gave attention to vs. what you willed… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Probably the most dangerous thing about college education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
You can be shaped, or you can be broken. There is not much in between. Try to learn. Be coachable. Try to… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention...it will actually be within your power to experience a crowded,… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Learning how to think" really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Bliss—a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
How promising you are as a Student of the Game is a function of what you can pay attention to without running… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“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
“I felt more solidly composed, now that I was horizontal. I was impossible to knock down.” — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“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 Image
“It's no accident that in a bureaucracy getting fired is called 'termination,' as in ontological erasure.” — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“Why is the truth usually not just un- but anti-interesting?” — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“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 Image
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 Image
