Appearing Quote by David Foster Wallace

“The greatest sin is appearing naive or old-fashioned so that somebody can give you a sort of a very cool arch smile and devastate you with one extraordinarily crafted line that puts kind of a hole in your pretentious balloon.” quote by David Foster Wallace — Download Open image

“The greatest sin is appearing naive or old-fashioned so that somebody can give you a sort of a very cool arch smile and devastate you with one extraordinarily crafted line that puts kind of a hole in your pretentious balloon.”

David Foster Wallace

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 3.6 out of 5 (3 ratings)

Appearing Arches Balloons Giving Holes Kind Lines Naive Old fashioned Pretentious Sin Very cool

More by David Foster Wallace

“I felt more solidly composed, now that I was horizontal. I was impossible to knock down.”

David Foster Wallace

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 the ice-cube tray, who unloads the clean dishwasher, who occasionally pees in the shower, whose eyelid twitches on first dates; that only we take casualness terribly seriously; that only we fashion supplication into courtesy; that only…

David Foster Wallace

“It's no accident that in a bureaucracy getting fired is called 'termination,' as in ontological erasure.”

David Foster Wallace

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

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

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 those worst dreams' form itself: the sudden intra-dream realization that the nightmares' very essence and center has been with you all along, even awake: it's just been ... overlooked ; and then that horrific interval between…

David Foster Wallace

“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

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 recoil from the dull. Maybe it's because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that's where phrases like 'deadly dull' or 'excruciatingly dull' come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic…

David Foster Wallace

“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 a matter of time before you start believing deep down that everything is sales and marketing, and that whenever somebody seems like they care about you or about some noble idea or cause, that person is…

David Foster Wallace

“Why is the truth usually not just un- but anti-interesting?”

David Foster Wallace

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

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

Image

Explore all 999 David Foster Wallace quotes

More Appearing quotes

I even see the cinema itself as a woman, with its alternation of light and darkness, of appearing and disappearing images

Federico Fellini

Image

I find it profoundly symbolic that I am appearing before a committee of fifteen men who will report to a legislative body of one hundred men because of a decision handed down by a court comprised of nine men--on an issue that affects millions of women… I have the feeling that if men could get pregnant, we wouldn't be struggling…

Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Acting is not a state of being ... but a state of appearing to be. You can't be eight times a week without going…

Noel Coward

Image

We owe America something because they turned us into a touring band. But at least we feel confident about appearing in Britain again now.…

Steve Marriott

Image

I stopped appearing as Dracula in 1972 because in my opinion the presentation of the character had deteriorated to such an extent, particularly bringing…

Christopher Lee

Image

It was 1988, I believe, that I met Grit. We were both appearing in a Canadian Folk Festival and as we sat backstage he…

Tom Chapin

Image

I am of course getting angry if biologists try to use the general concept 'chance' in order to explain phenomena which are so typical…

Wolfgang Paul

Image

Equity sends questions to Law. Law sends questions back to equity; Law finds it can't do this, equity finds it can't do that; neither…

Charles Dickens

Image

Layering in different patterns will keep things from appearing too studied.

Nate Berkus

Image

Barbra Streisand developed overwhelming performance anxiety at the height of her career; for 27 years she refused to perform for the general public, appearing…

Scott Stossel