“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
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
“You might consider how to escape from a cage must surely require, foremost, awareness of the fact of the cage.” — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“It is a fact of life that certain people are corrosive to others' self esteem simply as a function of who and… — 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
The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T… — 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 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
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
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
“JAY: Why is a story more upfront than life? LENORE: It just seems more honest, somehow. JAY: Honest meaning closer to 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
The fact that the most powerful and significant connections in our lives are (at the time) invisible to us seems to me… — 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
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
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
“It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical… — 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
The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death. It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Dr. Ambrose himself told Mark Nechtr...that the problem with young people, starting sometime in about the 1960s, is that they tend to… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
The boy, who did everything well and with a natural unslumped grace the wraith himself had always lacked, and whom the wraith… — 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
The basic idea that the purpose of life is to be happy or is to experience the most favorable ratio of pleasure… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe even 50, without wanting to… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“Even as I wrote my note to Fern, for instance, expressing sentiments and regrets that were real, a part of me was… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“The almost-35-year-old Terry Schmidt had very nearly nothing left anymore of the delusion that he differed from the great herd of the… — 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.… — 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 as… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“Were he now still among the living, Dr. Incandenza would now describe tennis in the paradoxical terms of what’s now called ‘Extra-Linear… — 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
“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical… — 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
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
“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
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
“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
