There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“exformation, which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people. — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“Good old traditional audio-only phone conversations allowed you to presume that the person on the other end was paying complete attention to… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“Do you suppose it's so much easier to make conversation with someone you already know well than with someone you don't know… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“The next suitable person you’re in light conversation with, you stop suddenly in the middle of the conversation and look at the… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“Look. Listen. Use ears I'd be proud to call our own. Listen to the silence behind the engines' noise. Jesus, Sweets, listen… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“...in real life I always seem to have a hard time winding up a conversation or asking somebody to leave, and sometimes… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“But I gotta tell you, I just think to look across this room and automatically assume that somebody else is less aware… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“I am wonderful fun to talk to. I’m a consummate professional. People leave my parlor in states. You are here. It’s conversation-time.… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“The next suitable person you’re in light conversation with, you stop suddenly in the middle of the conversation and look at the… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.10 10… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common. Both depend on what communication-theorists sometimes called "exformation," which is a… — 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
