Quotes by David Foster Wallace

“An ad that pretends to be art is -- at absolute best -- like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what's sinister is the cumulative eff...”

“Be on guard. The road widens, and many of the detours are seductive.”

“...most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking.”

“I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts clich about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learni...”

“Weight Watchers holds as a descriptive axiom the transparently true fact that for each of us the universe is deeply and sharply and completely divided into for example in my case, me, on one side, ...”

“For some reason I was reluctant to ask anybody what had happened. I hate being the person who always doesn't know what's going on and has to ask somebody; it always seems like everybody else knows ...”

“No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That o...”

“People hate people, not freedom.”

“Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? H...”

“I think there must be probably different types of suicides. I'm not one of the self-hating ones. The type of like "I'm shit and the world'd be better off without poor me" type that says that but al...”

“Um um um um um. This business ofthis business about marketing yourself, theres nothing wrong with that. Unless were allowed to think that thatsthat thats it. That thats the point, that thats the go...”

“Learning how to think' really means learning how to exercise some control over how & what you think. It means being conscious & aware enough to choose what you pay attention to & to choose how you ...”

“JAY: Why is a story more upfront than life?LENORE: It just seems more honest, somehow.JAY: Honest meaning closer to the truth?LENORE: I smell trap.JAY: I smell breakthrough. The truth is that there...”

“To experience commitment as the loss of options, a type of death, the death of childhood's limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress-this will happen, mark me. Childhood's end.”

“He could do the dextral pain the same way: Abiding. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glit...”

“But hed also gotten a personal prickly chill all over from his own thinking. He could do the dextral pain the same way: Abiding. No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right...”

“Hal finds he rather envies a man who feels he has something to explain his being fucked up, parents to blame it on.”

“I think I was very often bored as a child, but boredom is not what I knew it aswhat I knew was that I worried a lot”

“The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.”

“Think of the old clich about the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master. This, like many clichs, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth....”