Quotes by David Foster Wallace

“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”

“That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack. That concentrating on anything is very hard work.”

“Worship your body, beauty, and sexual allure and you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.”

“Think of the old cliché about the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master. This, like many clichés, so lame & banal on the surface, actually expresses a great & terrible truth.”

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”

“When a solipsist dies ... everything goes with him.”

“Im so scared of dying without ever being really seen. Can you understand?”

“I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture — a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It’s maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it’s not these things, quite. It’s more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I’m small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It’s wanting to jump overboard.”