Quotes by David Foster Wallace

“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 myri...”

“To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe its because dullness is intri...”

“When people call it [depression] I always get pissed off because I always think depression sounds like you just get like really sad, you get quiet and melancholy and just like sit quietly by the wi...”

“Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worsh...”

“Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he's devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits th...”

“Let me put it this way: You cannot live in the world without being in pain, spiritual and physical pain. We have developed mechanisms to deal with these pains, to overcome them somehow. Therapy, re...”

“You decide. You be the judge. It says You are welcome regardless of severity. Severity is in the eye of the sufferer, it says. Pain is pain.”

“Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?""I give.""You get someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or...”

“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim o...”

“Something they seem to omit to mention in Boston AA when you're new and out of your skull with desperation and ready to eliminate your map and they tell you how it'll all get better and better as y...”

“Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere Mary went, the lights became erratic.”

“The integrity of my sleep has been forever compromised, sir.”

“Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move.”

“Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.”

“It's always seemed a little preposterous that Hamlet, for all his paralyzing doubt about everything, never once doubts the reality of the ghost. Never questions his own madness might not in fact be...”

“This is why they started us here so young: to give ourselves away before the age when the questions 'why' and 'to what' grow real beaks and claws.”

“We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately (...) To games or needles, to some other person.”

“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 ther...”

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