“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
To be, in a word, unborable.... It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
We're not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader's own life "outside" the… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“Even the novice alone can see quickly that a life conducted, temporarily or no, as a simple renunciation of value becomes at… — 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
“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
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
“In life, the microphone passes your lips but once... you had better be ready to sing.” — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“There's more to life than sitting there interfacing, it might be a newsflash to you.” — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“one is that you attain the goal and realize the shocking realization that attaining the goal does not complete or redeem you,… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating… — 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’s the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I’m operating on the automatic,… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing… — 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
“In lots of ways, television purveys and enables dreams, and most of these dreams involve some sort of transcendence of average daily… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“I really feel, sitting, trying to extrapolate on the equations that have informed the last two years of my life, as though… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“American human beings are a slippery and protean bunch in real life, hard as hell to get any kind of universal handle… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“Um um um um um. This business of—this business about marketing yourself, there’s nothing wrong with that. Unless we’re allowed to think… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“This is another paradox, that many of the most important impressions and thoughts in a person's life are ones that flash through… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
But if I decide to decide there’s a different, less selfish, less lonely point to my life, won’t the reason for this… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
The lives of most people are small tight pallid and sad, more to be mourned than their deaths. We starve at 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
