David Foster Wallace quotes - page 2

My chest bumps like a dryer with shoes in it. (David Foster Wallace)
American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret. View quote
David Foster Wallace
He suddenly felt nothing, or rather Nothing, a pre-tornadic stillness of zero sensation, as if he were the very space he occupied. View quote
David Foster Wallace
I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art. View quote
David Foster Wallace
The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates. View quote
David Foster Wallace
These worst mornings with cold floors and hot windows and merciless light - the soul's certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer. View quote
David Foster Wallace
It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most "familiarity" is meditated and delusive. View quote
David Foster Wallace
The assumption that everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism. View quote
David Foster Wallace
My bones are ringing the way sometimes people say their ears are ringing, I'm so tired. View quote
David Foster Wallace
That it is statistically easier for low-IQ people to kick an addiction than it is for high-IQ people...That boring activities become, perversely, much less boring if you concentrate intently on them. View quote
David Foster Wallace
They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier. (David Foster Wallace)
Rap's conscious response to the poverty and oppression of U.S. blacks is like some hideous parody of sixties black pride. View quote
David Foster Wallace
A large percentage of bright young men and women locate the impetus behind their career choice in the belief that they are fundamentally different from the common run of man, unique and in certain crucial ways superior, more as it were central, meaningful-what else could explain the fact that they themselves have been at the exact center of all they've experienced for the whole 20 years of their conscious lives?-and that they can and will make a difference in their chosen field simply by the fact of their unique and central presence to it... View quote
David Foster Wallace
There's good self-consciousness, and then there's toxic, paralyzing, raped-by-psychic-Bedouins self-consciousness. View quote
David Foster Wallace
We're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we've never even met? View quote
David Foster Wallace
...we live in an era of terrible preoccupation with presentation and interpretation, one in which relations between who someone is and what he believes and how he "expresses himself" have been thrown into big time flux. View quote
David Foster Wallace
I'd tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear. View quote
David Foster Wallace
Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear. View quote
David Foster Wallace
I don't think writers are any smarter than other people. I think they may be more compelling in their stupidity, or in their confusion. View quote
David Foster Wallace
... morning is the soul's night. View quote
David Foster Wallace
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. (David Foster Wallace)
In reality, 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. View quote
David Foster Wallace
That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we're all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine... View quote
David Foster Wallace
All I'm saying is that it's shortsighted to blame TV. It's simply another symptom. TV didn't invent our aesthetic childishness here any more than the Manhattan Project invented aggression. View quote
David Foster Wallace
life's endless war against the self you cannot live without. View quote
David Foster Wallace