Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself. — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
'This thing I feel, I can't name it straight out but it seems important, do you feel it too?' — this sort… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important-if you want to operate on… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Both destiny's kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person's basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e.… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most "familiarity" is meditated and delusive. — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
We live today in a world where most of the really important developments in everything from math and physics and astronomy to… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it. — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
...the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. — 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
“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
