David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallacewas an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist, as well as a professor of English and creative writing. Wallace's 1996 novel Infinite Jest was cited by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth21 February 1962
CountryUnited States of America
David Foster Wallace quotes about
american-writer human
Fiction's about what it is to be a human being.
bored people frustrated
Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have much harder, more tedious or painful lives than I do, overall.
hair blood wind
The sound of wind had become, for me, silence. When it went away, I was left with the squeak of the blood in my head and the aural glitter of all those little eardrum hairs quivering like a drunk in withdrawal.
hubris ability thirteen
I had, by thirteen, developed a sort of Taoist hubris about my ability to control via non-control.
zero space emptiness
He suddenly felt nothing, or rather Nothing, a pre-tornadic stillness of zero sensation, as if he were the very space he occupied.
silly sadness two
I was always either so unreasonably and pointlessly happy that no one place could seem to contain me, or so melancholy, so sick and silly with sadness that there was no place I could stomach the thought of entering. I hated it here. And I have never been as happy as when I was here. And these two things together confront me with the beak and claws of the True.
pride
She took a sort of abject pride in her mecilessness toward herself.
smart book years
It took years after I’d graduated from Amherst to realize that people were actually far more complicated and interesting than books, that almost everyone else suffered the same secret fears and inadequacies as I, and that feeling alone and inferior was actually the great valent bond between us all. I wish I’d been smart enough to understand that when I was an adolescent.
singing acting helping
I'm screaming for help and everybody's acting as if I'm singing Ethel Merman covers...
marijuana emotional psychics
...hideous psychic fallout they'd all endured both in active marijuana-dependency and then in marijuana-detox: the social isolation, anxious lassitude, and the hyperself-consciousness that then reinforced the withdrawal and anxiety - the increasing emotional abstraction, poverty of affect, and then total emotional catalepsy - the obsessive analyzing, finally the paralytic stasis that results from obsessive analysis of all possible implications of both getting up from the couch and not getting up from the couch...
religious powerful facts
The fact that the most powerful and significant connections in our lives are (at the time) invisible to us seems to me a compelling argument for religious reverence rather than skeptical empiricism as a response to life's meaning.
two lines diagnosis
This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn't engage anybody.
travel stronger agoraphobia
For me, boviscopophobia is an even stronger motive than semi-agoraphobia for staying on the ship when we're in port.
enemy together common
Nothing brings you together like a common enemy.