David Foster Wallace Quotes - Page 2

So tonight to shush you how about if I say I have administrative bones to pick with God, Boo. I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I'm not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I, Boo.

she committed suicide by putting her extremities down the garbage disposal-first one arm and then, kind of miraculously if you think about it, the other arm.

What I know about auto racing could be inscribed with a dry Magic Marker on the lip of a Coke bottle.

Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.

I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.

I guess a bit part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves.

I'm so scared of dying without ever being really seen.

...having a lot of money does not immunize people from suffering or fear.

There is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.

I read,' I say. 'I study and read. I bet I've read everything you've read. Don't think I haven't. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.

Fervent Christians are always remembering themselves as - and thus, by extension, judging everyone else outside their sect to be - lost and hopeless and just barely clinging to any kind of interior sense of value or reason or even to go on living, before they were 'saved.

Credo di sembrare un tipo normale, forse persino simpatico, anche se mi hanno consigliato di apparire il più normale possibile, e di non provare nemmeno a fare quella che a me parrebbe un'espressione simpatica o un sorriso.

...the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.

The Moms revealed that if you're not crazy then speaking to someone who isn't there is termed apostrophe and is valid art.

...when he kneels at other times and prays or meditates or tries to achieve a Big-Picture spiritual understanding of God as he can understand Him, he feels Nothing - not nothing, but Nothing, an edgeless blankness that somehow feels worse than the sort of unconsidered atheism he Came In with.

You decide. You be the judge. It says You are welcome regardless of severity. Severity is in the eye of the sufferer, it says. Pain is pain.

Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it."

[Q&A with Larry McCaffery, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1993, Vol. 13.2]

It is about simple awareness - awareness of what is so real and
essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep
reminding ourselves, over and over: “This is water, this is water.

How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?

People hate people, not freedom.