It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed,… — 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
People, unless they're paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority. — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“Learning how to think' really means learning how to exercise some control over how & what you think. It means being conscious… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me,… — 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
Probably the most dangerous thing about college education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“If, by the virtue of charity or the funded Ennet House, you will acquire many exotic new facts. You will find out… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention...it will actually be within your power to experience a crowded,… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed,… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
You can be shaped, or you can be broken. There is not much in between. Try to learn. Be coachable. Try to… — 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
How promising you are as a Student of the Game is a function of what you can pay attention to without running… — 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