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“The assumption that you everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“But he’d also gotten a personal prickly chill all over from his own thinking. He could do the dextral pain the same way: Abiding. No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering. And the projected future fear of the A.D.A., whoever was out there in a hat eating Third World fast food; the fear of getting convicted of Nuckslaughter, of V.I.P.-suffocation; of a lifetime on the edge of his bunk in M.C.I. Walpole, remembering. It’s too much to think about. To Abide there. But none of it’s as of now real. What’s real is the tube and Noxzema and pain. And this could be done just like the Old Cold Bird. He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over. What’s unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. What his head could report to him, looking over and ahead and reporting. But he could choose not to listen; he could treat his head like G. Day or R. Lenz: clueless noise. He hadn’t quite gotten this before now, how it wasn’t just the matter of riding out the cravings for a Substance: everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news you then somehow believed.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“I'm not saying that television is vulgar and dumb because the people who compose the Audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.”
― David Foster Wallace

“The reasons that center on others are easy to manipulate. All hollow things are light.”
― David Foster Wallace, Girl With Curious Hair

“The point of books was to combat loneliness”
― David Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

“Te occidere possunt sed te edere possunt nefas est.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms nearly always shoot themselves in...the head. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.”
― David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

“JAY: No really. Be secure. Pretend I'm a sperm cell. Here. I take the string out of the... hood of my sweatshirt, affix it to my behind for a tail, like so...

LENORE: What in God's name are you doing?

JAY: Pretend, Lenore. Be an ovum. Be strong. Let me hypothetically batter at you. Batter batter. Surrender to the unreal of the real interior.

LENORE: Are you supposed to be a sperm, wriggling your sweatshirt-string like that?

JAY: I can feel the strength of your membrane, Lenore.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System

“Infinite Jest�� is just awful. It seems ridiculous to have to say it.”
― Harold Bloom

“He can’t think, he can’t write. There’s no discernible talent.”
― Harold Bloom

“I think, today’s irony ends up saying: "How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.”
― David Foster Wallace

“That's when he realized, Academia was rather dark here in L'adademie.”
― R.C. Waldun, ��'��������é������

“Stephen King is Cervantes compared with David Foster Wallace. We have no standards left.”
― Harold Bloom

“It's just much easier with dogs. You don't get laid; but you also don't get the feeling you're hurting their feelings all the time.”
― David Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

“But and so things are slow, and like you they have this irritating suspicion that any real satisfaction is still way, way off, and it’s frustrating; but like basically decent kids they suck it up, bite the foil, because what’s going on is just plain real; and no matter what we want, the real world is pretty slow, at present, for kids our age. It probably gets less slow as you get older and more of the world is behind you, and less ahead, but very few people of our generation are going to find this exchange attractive, I’ll bet.”
― David Foster Wallace, Girl with Curious Hair

“This was the first thing I ever said, "All right, I'm gonna try to do the very best I can." Instead of doing this, "All right, I'll work at like three-quarters speed, and then I can always figure that if I just hadn't been a fuckup, the book coulda been really good." You know that defense system? You write the paper the night before, so if it doesn't get a great grade, you know that it could've been better.
And this worked--I worked as hard as I could on this. And in a weird way, you might think that would make me more nervous about whether people would like it. But there was this weird--you know like when you work out really well, there's this kind of tiredness that's real pleasant, and it's sort of placid.”
― David Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

“When something large and oncoming passed, the windshield's big rectangle was for a moment incandesced and opaque with water, which the wipers heaved mightily to displace.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“The great myth is that the bad ones don't last long.”
― David Foster Wallace, Oblivion

“Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move.”
― David Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

“Lenore, it's simply that I love you. You know that. Every fiber of your being is loved by every fiber of my being. The thought of things about you, concerning you, troubling you, that I don't know about, makes blood run from my eyes, on the inside.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System

“Something they seem to omit to mention in Boston AA when you're new and out of your skull with desperation and ready to eliminate your map and they tell you how it'll all get better and better as you abstain and recover: they somehow omit to mention that the way it gets better and you get better is through pain. Not around pain, or in spite of it. They leave this out, talking instead about Gratitude and Release from Compulsion. There's serious pain in being sober, though, you find out, after time. Then now that you're clean and don't even much want Substances and feeling like you want to both cry and stomp somebody into goo with pain, these Boston AAs start in on telling you you're right where you're supposed to be and telling you to remember the pointless pain of active addiction and telling you that at least this sober pain now has a purpose. At least this pain means you're going somewhere, they say, instead of the repetitive gerbil-wheel of addictive pain.
They neglect to tell you that after the urge to get high magically vanishes and you've been Substanceless for maybe six or eight months, you'll begin to start to 'Get In Touch' with why it was that you used Substances in the first place. You'll start to feel why it was you got dependent on what was, when you get right down to it, an anesthetic. 'Getting In Touch With Your Feelings' is another quilted-sampler-type cliche that ends up masking something ghastly deep and real, it turns out. [178: A more abstract but truer epigram that White Flaggers with a lot of sober time sometimes change this to goes something like: 'Don't worry about getting in touch with your feelings, they'll get in touch with you.’]
It starts to turn out that the vapider the AA cliche, the sharper the canines of the real truth it covers.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Eyes the broad-shouldered faceless character that symbolizes Men’s Room, does Sternberg, and struggles with himself. He’s needed a bowel movement for hours, and since the LordAloft 7:10 lifted things have gotten critical. He tried, back at O’Hare. But he was unable to, because he was afraid to, afraid that Mark, who has the look of someone who never just has to, might enter the rest room and see Sternberg’s shoes under a stall door and know that he, Sternberg, was having a bowel movement in that stall, infer that Sternberg had bowels, and thus organs, and thus a body. Like many Americans of his generation in this awkwardest of post-Imperial decades, an age suspended between exhaustion and replenishment, between input too ordinary to process and input too intense to bear, Sternberg is deeply ambivalent about being embodied; an informing fear that, were he really just an organism, he’d be nothing more than an ism of his organs.”
― David Foster Wallace, Girl with Curious Hair

“The problem is going to be, "Let's see, I spent all day staring at a computer screen and then at night my most meaningful relationships are with the two-dimensional characters who aren't in fact two-dimensional characters . . . Gee, I wonder why I'm lonely and doing a lot of drugs? Could there be any connection between the fact that I've got nothing to do with other people, that I don't really have a fucking clue what it is to have a real life, and the fact that most of my existence is mediated by entertainment that I passively choose to receive?”
― David Foster Wallace, David Foster Wallace: The Last Interview and Other Conversations

“Nel momento in cui riconosceva quello che c'era su una cartuccia provava la sensazione carica d'ansia che ci fosse qualcosa di meglio su un'altra cartuccia e che potenzialmente se lo stava perdendo. Poi si rese conto che avrebbe avuto tutto il tempo di godersi ogni cartuccia e capì intellettualmente che non aveva senso provare il panico di perdersi qualcosa.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Supongo que ser tímido significa básicamente estar absorbido por uno mismo hasta el punto de que se hace difícil estar rodeado de otras personas”
― David Foster Wallace, Conversations with David Foster Wallace

“Something they seem to omit to mention in Boston AA when you're new and out of your skull
with desperation and ready to eliminate your map and they tell you how it'll all get better and
better as you abstain and recover: they somehow omit to mention that the way it gets better
and you get better is through pain. Not around pain, or in spite of it. They leave this out, talking
instead about Gratitude and Release from Compulsion. There's serious pain in being sober,
though, you find out, after time. Then now that you're clean and don't even much want
Substances and feeling like you want to both cry and stomp somebody into goo with pain,
these Boston AAs start in on telling you you're right where you're supposed to be and telling
you to remember the pointless pain of active addiction and telling you that at least this sober
pain now has a purpose. At least this pain means you're going somewhere, they say, instead of
the repetitive gerbil-wheel of addictive pain.
They neglect to tell you that after the urge to get high magically vanishes and you've been
Substanceless for maybe six or eight months, you'll begin to start to 'Get In Touch' with why it
was that you used Substances in the first place. You'll start to feel why it was you got
dependent on what was, when you get right down to it, an anesthetic. 'Getting In Touch With
Your Feelings' is another quilted-sampler-type cliche that ends up masking something ghastly
deep and real, it turns out. [178: A more abstract but truer epigram that White Flaggers with a lot of sober time sometimes change this to goes something like: 'Don't worry about getting in touch with your feelings, they'll get in touch with you.’]
It starts to turn out that the vapider the AA cliche, the sharper the canines of the real truth it
covers.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“A legbensőségesebb emlékem Őkelméről az állkapcsa szúróssága és a nyakszaga, amikor vacsoránál elnyomott az álom, és fölvitt lefeküdni. Vékony nyaka volt, de jó meleg szaggal [...]”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“He made a gesture I can't describe: 'Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality--there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand? Here is the truth --actual heroism receives no queues up to see it. No one is interested.'
He paused again and smiled in a way that was not one bit self-mocking. True heroism is you, alone, in a designated work space. True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care--with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world. Just you and the job, at your desk. You and the return, you and the cash-flow data, you and the inventory protocol, you and the depreciation schedules, you and the numbers.' His tone was wholly matter-of-fact.”
― David Foster Wallace, Something to Do with Paying Attention

“Não é significativo que, em inglês, as palavras lobster (lagosta), fish (peixe) e chicken (frango) se refiram tanto ao animal quanto à carne, enquanto a maior parte dos mamíferos exige eufemismos como beef (carne de boi) e pork (carne de porco) para nos ajudar a separar a carne que comemos da criatura viva a quem um dia ela pertenceu? Seria isso uma prova de que existe um desconforto profundo a respeito de comer animais superiores, endêmico o bastante para vir à tona no idioma, mas que diminui à medida que nos afastamos da ordem dos mamíferos? (E seria lamb/lamb (cordeiro/cordeiro) o contraexemplo que empana toda essa teoria, ou existiriam motivos especiais, bíblico-históricos, para tal equivalência?)”
― David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

“I bought a house, it's small and brick and next to a horse pasture. It has what seems like a 6-acre lawn, and I bought the house in the winter and it didn't occur to me that the grass in this lawn grows and will have somehow to be dealt with. I haven't mowed a lawn since I folded my childhood lawn-mowing business at 13, and I see all my neighbors mowing their own 6-acre lawns like every fourth day, and Weed-Whacking, and dispersing seed and nitrates through devices that look like enormous flour-sifters on wheels, and I am not keen on becoming a lawn-obsessed homeowner. But it's nice to own a house and not pay off a landlord's mortgage.”
― D.T. Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace