David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace

Writer

David Foster Wallace was an influential American writer known for his complex narratives and deep explorations of truth and anxiety, particularly in 'Infinite Jest.'

Thinking People Writing Real Art Loneliness
Born
February 21, 1962
Died
September 12, 2008
Quotes
345
Rank
#423

Quote collection

David Foster Wallace quotes (page 5 of 18)

345 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.

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"John McEnroe...was arguably the best serve-and-volley man of all time, but then McEnroe was an exception to pretty much every predictive norm there was. At his peak (say 1980 to 1984), he was the greatest tennis player who ever lived-the most talented, the most beautiful, the most tormented: a genius. For me, watching McEnroe don a blue polyester blazer and do stiff lame truistic color commentary for TV is like watching Faulkner do a Gap ad."

Beautiful Sports Player
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"Most of us will still take nihilism over neanderthalism."

Nihilism Stills
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"He said she went around with her feelings out in front of her with an arm around the feelings' windpipe and a Glock 9mm. to the feelings' temple like a terrorist with a hostage, daring you to shoot."

Feelings Arms Temples
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"It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience."

Mean Attention Pay
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"Is it possible really to love other people? If I’m lonely and in pain, everyone outside me is potential relief—I need them. But can you really love what you need so badly? Isn’t a big part of love caring more about what the other person needs? How am I supposed to subordinate my own overwhelming need to somebody else’s needs that I can’t even feel directly? And yet if I can’t do this, I’m damned to loneliness, which I definitely don’t want … so I’m back at trying to overcome my selfishness for self-interested reasons."

Lonely Pain Loneliness
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"There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship - be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles - is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive."

Mother Spiritual Ethical Principles
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"To be a mass tourist, for me,...is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing."

Tourists Lines Dimensions
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"For these cultures, getting rid of the pain without addressing the deeper cause would be like shutting off a fire alarm while the fire's still going."

Pain Fire Alarms
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"Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes."

Nuclear Weapons Tvs
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"I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader."

Thinking Desire Young Writers
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"Perhaps this is what it means to go mad: to be emptied and to be aware of the emptiness."

Mean Mad Emptiness
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"There is no hatred in my love for you. Only a sadness I feel all the more strongly for my inability to explain or describe it."

Sadness Hatred My Love For You
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"I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I'm not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I."

Crazy Issues Style
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"There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact - in its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of social equality for social equality itself - of vastly more help to conservatives and the US status quo than traditional SNOOT prescriptions ever were."

Reform Dialect Facts
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"Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?"

Pain Agnostic Infinite Jest
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"This is not a matter of virtue-it's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self."

Self Lenses Matter
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