Quotes by David Foster Wallace

It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.

She was terrified of everything, and terrified to show it.

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

Its no accident that in a bureaucracy getting fired is called termination, as in ontological erasure.

Were all on each others food chain. All of us. Its an individual sport. Welcome to the meaning of individual. Were each deeply alone here. Its what we all have in common, this aloneness.

Im not afraid of new things. Im just afraid of feeling alone even when theres somebody else there. Im afraid of feeling bad. Maybe thats selfish, but its the way I feel.

God, what a ghastly enterprise to be in, though--and what an odd way to achieve success. Im an exhibitionist who wants to hide, but is unsuccessful at hiding; therefore, somehow I succeed.

The assumption that you everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.

Is it possible that future generations will regard our present agribuisness and eating practices in much the same way we now view Neros entertainments or Mengeles experiments? My own initial reaction is that such a comparison is hysterical, extreme - and yet the reason it seems extreme to me appears to be that I believe animals are less morally important than human behings; and when it comes to defending such a belief, even to myself, I have to acknowledge that (a) I have an obvious selfish interest in this belief, since I like to eat certain kinds of animals and want to be able to keep doing it, and (b) I havent succeeded in working out any sort of personal ethical system in which the belief is truly defensible instead of just selfishly convenient.

Commercial comedys often set up to feature an ironist makingdevastating sport of someone whos naive or sentimental or pretentious orpompous.

... A lobotomy involved some kind of rod or probe inserted through the eyesocket,the term was always frontal lobotomy;but was there any other kind?Knowing that internal stress could cause failure on the exam merely set up internal stress about the prospect of internal stress. There must be some other way to deal with the knowledge of the disastrous consequences fear and stress could bring about.Some answer or trick of the will:the ability not to think about it.What if everyone knew this trick but Claude Sylvanshine?He tended to conceptualize some ultimate,platonic-level Terror as a bird of prey in whose mere aloft shadow the prey was stricken and paralyzed,tembling as the shadow enlarged and became inevitability.He frequently had this feeling:What if there was something essentially wrong with Claude Sylvanshine that wasnt wrong with other people?What if he was simply ill-suited,the way some people are born without limbs or certain organs?The neurology of failure.What if he was simply born and destined to live in the shadow of Total Fear and Despair,and all his so called activities were pathetic attempts to distract him from the inevitable?...

The mother at thirty with face commencing to display the faint seams of the plan for the second face life had in store for her and which she feared would be her own mother’s

What teachers and the administration in that era never seemed to see was that the mental work of what they called daydreaming often required more effort and concentration than it would have taken simply to listen in class. Laziness is not the issue. It is just not the work dictated by the administration.

The most dangerous thing about an academic education is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract thinking instead of simply paying attention to what’s going on in front of me.

I never, even for a moment, doubted what they’d told me. This is why it is that adults and even parents can, unwittingly, be cruel: they cannot imagine doubt’s complete absence. They have forgotten.

His parents’ pregnancies must have been all-out chromosomatic war

A question, doctor, he said. Why doesnt the coyote take the money he spends on bird costumes and catapults and radioactive road runner food pellets and explosive missiles and simply go eat Chinese? He smiled coolly. Why doesnt the coyote simply go eat Chinese food?

You might consider how to escape from a cage must surely require, foremost, awareness of the fact of the cage.

But if I decide to decide there’s a different, less selfish, less lonely point to my life, won’t the reason for this decision be my desire to be less lonely, meaning to suffer less overall pain? Can the decision to be less selfish ever be anything other than a selfish decision?

I think the world divides neatly into those who are excited by the managed induction of terror and those who are not. I do not find terror exciting. I find it terrifying. One of my basic goals is to subject my nervous system to as little total terror as possible. The cruel paradox of course is that this kind of makeup usually goes hand in hand with a delicate nervous system thats extremely easy to terrify.