“...a harried commuter is mistaken for Christ by a child he knocks over.” — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“Who teaches your U.S.A. children how to choose their temple? What to love enough not to think two times?” — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“I think I was very often bored as a child, but boredom is not what I knew it as—what I knew was… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
It was when I was the age where you can, as they say, "hear voices" without worrying that something is wrong with… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
I perhaps could have been somewhat better. One of the interesting things about playing competitive sports as a child is that you… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“But someone sometime let you forget how to choose, and what. Someone let your peoples forget it was the only thing of… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
In reality, genuine epiphanies are extremely rare. In contemporary adult life maturation & acquiescence to reality are gradual processes. Modern usage usually… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“Deluded or not, it's still a lucky way to live. Even though it's temporary. It may well be that the lower-ranked little… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
I was never the sort of child who believed in "monsters under the bed" or vampires, or who needed a night-light in… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“One of the few things I still miss from my Midwest childhood was this weird, deluded but unshakable conviction that everything around… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“It may be that psychologists are off-base in their preoccupation with children’s need to feel that their father or some other parent… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
If you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern,… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
But the young educated adults of the 90s -- who were, of course, the children of the same impassioned infidelities and divorces… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
The truth is that the heroism of your childhood entertainments was not true valor. It was theatre. The grand gesture, the moment… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“You see parents as kind or unkind or happy or miserable or drunk or sober or great or near-great or failed the… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“The point here for the best kids is to inculcate their sense that it’s never about being seen. It’s never. If they… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“Okay, you know, is it weird to get so depressed watching a children’s Christmas special— Oh, wait, I shouldn’t say that. I… — 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
