“You know, the whole thing about perfectionism. The perfectionism is very dangerous. Because of course if your fidelity to perfectionism is too… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“But Don you're still a human being, you still want to live, you crave connection and society, you know intellectually that you're… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
If you worship power, you will feel weak and afraid, needing ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“...having a lot of money does not immunize people from suffering or fear.” — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“You burn to have your photograph in a tennis magazine.” “I’m afraid so.” “Why again exactly, now?” “I guess to be felt… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“... A lobotomy involved some kind of rod or probe inserted through the eyesocket,the term was always "frontal" lobotomy;but was there any… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“I kept saying her name and she would ask What? and I’d say her name again. I’m not afraid of how this… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“When you’re meeting a whole lot of new people and having to do things you’re in—I’m in a constant low-level state of… — david foster wallace Copy Share Image
I'm not afraid of new things. I'm just afraid of feeling alone even when there's somebody else there. I'm afraid of feeling… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“I go through a loop in which I notice all the ways I am — for just an example — self-centered and… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“It never occurred to him to ask her what sort of demeanor she preferred. He didn't have to strategize or even scheme.… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“But he’d also gotten a personal prickly chill all over from his own thinking. He could do the dextral pain the same… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“There are, apparently, persons who are deeply afraid of their own emotions, particularly the painful ones. Grief, regret, sadness. Sadness especially, perhaps.… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. For me… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“A U.S. of modern A. where the State is not a team or a code, but a sort of sloppy intersection of… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“Maybe it’s not metaphysics. Maybe it’s existential. I’m talking about the individual US citizen’s deep fear, the same basic fear that you… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“And I was -- this is just how I was afraid you'd take it. I knew it, that you'd think this means… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Real leaders are people who “help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“No more Network reluctance to make a program too entertaining for fear its commercials would pale in comparison.” — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“I think the world divides neatly into those who are excited by the managed induction of terror and those who are not.… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Please learn the pragmatics of expressing fear: sometimes words that seem to express really invoke. This can be tricky. — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
You don't have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness ... has to do with… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
I felt the sort of soaring, ceilingless tedium that transcends tedium and becomes worry. — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“Organized shuffleboard has always filled me with dread. Everything about it suggests infirm senescence and death: it's a game played on the… — 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
