“If, by the virtue of charity or the circumstance of desperation, you ever chance to spend a little time around a Substance-recovery… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness. — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“There is something magical to me about literature and fiction and I think it can do things not only that pop culture… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“Today's sub-40s have different horrors, prominent among which are anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
But the young educated adults of the 90s -- who were, of course, the children of the same impassioned infidelities and divorces… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Most of the writers I know are weird hybrids. There's a strong streak of egomania coupled with extreme shyness. Writing's kind of… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. — 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
“Weight Watchers holds as a descriptive axiom the transparently true fact that for each of us the universe is deeply and sharply… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“Forget so-called peer-pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“If, by the virtue of charity or the circumstance of desperation, you ever chance to spend a little time around a Substance-recovery… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Is it possible really to love other people? If I’m lonely and in pain, everyone outside me is potential relief—I need them.… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Fiction, poetry, music...these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated. — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud… — 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
