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
“Which he said was the big lie they all bought that made doctors and standard therapy such a waste of time for… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
John McEnroe...was arguably the best serve-and-volley man of all time, but then McEnroe was an exception to pretty much every predictive norm… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“Workshop Hermeticism, fiction for which the highest praise involves the words 'competent,' 'finished,' 'problem-free,' fiction over which Writing-Program pre- and proscriptions loom… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“I spent a lot of time as a volunteer in a nursing home in Amherst last summer. I was reading Dante's Divine… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“The fraudulence paradox was that the more time and effort you put into trying to appear impressive or attractive to other people,… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
If you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern,… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“This is what people call a view. And you knew that from below you wouldn't look nearly so high overhead. You see… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“ *One clue that there’s something not quite real about sequential time the way you experience it is the various paradoxes of… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“If you spend enough time reading or writing, you find a voice, but you also find certain tastes. You find certain writers… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“...in real life I always seem to have a hard time winding up a conversation or asking somebody to leave, and sometimes… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day.… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
“I say is someone in there?’ The voice is the young post-New formalist from Pittsburgh who affects Continental and wears an ascot… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
The truth is that the heroism of your childhood entertainments was not true valor. It was theatre. The grand gesture, the moment… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
Hear this or not, as you will. Learn it now, or later -- the world has time. Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy,… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share Image
If you spend enough time reading or writing, you find a voice, but you also find certain tastes. You find certain writers… — 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
“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
“It's no accident that in a bureaucracy getting fired is called 'termination,' as in ontological erasure.” — David Foster Wallace Copy Share
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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
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
“It is within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same… — David Foster Wallace Copy Share
