100 Great Quotes By David Foster Wallace That Will Help You Craft Literary Oeuvre
Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.
I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.
The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.
You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
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?
Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.
Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.
Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.
It's weird to feel like you miss someone you're not even sure you know.
Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself.
The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.
How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.
Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.
It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.
I had kind of a midlife crisis at twenty which probably doesn’t augur well for my longevity
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.
There's good self-consciousness, and then there's toxic, paralyzing, raped-by-psychic-Bedouins self-consciousness.
You have decided being scared is caused mostly by thinking.
Te Occidere Possunt Sed Te Edere Non Possunt Nefas Est" ("They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier").
What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.
...logical validity is not a guarantee of truth.
Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.
And Lo, for the Earth was empty of Form, and void. And Darkness was all over the Face of the Deep. And We said: 'Look at that fucker Dance.
The thing about people who are truly and malignantly crazy: their real genius is for making the people around them think they themselves are crazy. In military science this is called Psy-Ops, for your info.
Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.
To be, in a word, unborable.... It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish
I'd like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time, instead of having to go back in my head and enjoy them.
I have filled 3 Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me.
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.
The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.
