Great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common. Both depend on what communication-theorists sometimes called "exformation," which is a… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
At root, vulgar just means popular on a mass scale. It is the semantic opposite of pretentious or snobby. It is humility… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
But of course there are all kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
The sound of wind had become, for me, silence. When it went away, I was left with the squeak of the blood… — 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
What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really… — 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 feels intensely twisted to see reigning industry queen Jenna Jameson chilling out at the Vivid booth in Jordaches and a latex… — 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
Some persons can give themselves away to an ambitious pursuit and have that be all the giving-themselves-away-to-something they need to do. Though… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
I have heard upscale adult U.S. citizens ask the ship's Guest Relations Desk whether snorkeling necessitates getting wet...I now know the precise… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
I never, even for a moment, doubted what they’d told me. This is why it is that adults and even parents can,… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
This is not a matter of virtue-it's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Kafka's evocations are, rather, unconscious and almost sub-archetypal, the little-kid stuff from which myths derive; this is why we tend to call… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
I felt, as I became a later and later bloomer, alienated not just from my own recalcitrant glabrous little body but in… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
K--: 'When they say "I am my own person," "I do not need a man," "I am responsible for my own sexuality,"… — 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
“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
![“What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human [...] is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.” quote by David Foster Wallace](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/be2/david-foster-wallace-161_cynical_what-passes-for-hip-cynical-transcendenc_1913993.jpg)
