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David Foster Wallace

Writer
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What if, when Tracy Austin writes that after her 1989 car crash, 'I quickly accepted that there was nothing I could do about it,' the statement is not only true but exhaustively descriptive of the entire acceptance process she went through?
From Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Sports
The integrity of my sleep has been forever compromised, sir.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Funny
Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Funny
Statisticians report that television is watched over six hours a day in the average American household. I don't know any fiction writers who live in average American households. I suspect Louise Erdrich might. Actually I have never seen an average American household. Except on TV.
From A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Television
Tell them there are no holes for your fingers in the masks of
men. Tell them how could you ever even hope to love what you can't
grab onto.
From Girl with Curious Hair
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
When a solipsist dies ... everything goes with him.
From Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Death
Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Television
Fervent Christians are always remembering themselves as - and thus, by extension, judging everyone else outside their sect to be - lost and hopeless and just barely clinging to any kind of interior sense of value or reason or even to go on living, before they were 'saved.
From The Pale King
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Religion
Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.

The human beauty we're talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings' reconciliation with the fact of having a body.
From Both Flesh and Not: Essays
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Sports
I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture — a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It’s maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it’s not these things, quite. It’s more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I’m small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It’s wanting to jump overboard.
From A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Death
Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere Mary went, the lights became erratic.
From Infinite Jest
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Funny
Note the way "up close and personal" profiles of professional athletes strain so hard to find evidence of a rounded human life–outside interests and activities, values beyond the sport. We ignore what's obvious, that most of this straining is farce. It's farce because the realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one area of excellence. An ascetic focus. A subsumption of almost all other features of human life to one chosen talent and pursuit. A consent to live in a world that, like a child's world, is very small.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Sports
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 not there's a dog.
From Infinite Jest
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Funny
I'm so scared of dying without ever being really seen. Can you understand?
From Infinite Jest
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Death
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.
From This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Education
shall I spend much of your time pointing out the degree to which televisual values influence the contemporary mood of jaded weltschmerz, self-mocking materialism, blank indifference, and the delusion that cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive?
From A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Television
And with Letterman, Miller, Shandling, and Leno’s battery of hip, sardonic, this-is-
just-TV schticks, the circle back to the days of “We’ve just got to get Miss Ball on our show, Bud” has closed and come spiral, television’s power to jettison connection and castrate protest fueled by the very ironic
postmodern self-consciousness it had first helped fashion.
From E Unibus Pluram
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Television
Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.
From Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Philosophical
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.
From Infinite Jest
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Philosophical
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.
From Infinite Jest
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Philosophical
I’d tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Philosophical
The real, many-veiled answer to the question of just what goes through a great player's mind as he stands at the center of hostile crowd-noise and lines up the free-throw that will decide the game might well be: nothing at all.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Sports
How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?
From Infinite Jest
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Education
And that those who receive and act out the gift of athletic genius must, perforce, be blind and dumb about it — and not because blindness and dumbness are the price of the gift, but because they are its essence.
From How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart (A Story from Consider the Lobster): And Other Essays
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Sports
What if, when Tracy Austin writes that after her 1989 car crash, 'I quickly accepted that there was nothing I could do about it,' the statement is not only true but exhaustively descriptive of the entire acceptance process she went through?
From Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Sports
The integrity of my sleep has been forever compromised, sir.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Funny
Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Funny
Statisticians report that television is watched over six hours a day in the average American household. I don't know any fiction writers who live in average American households. I suspect Louise Erdrich might. Actually I have never seen an average American household. Except on TV.
From A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Television
Tell them there are no holes for your fingers in the masks of
men. Tell them how could you ever even hope to love what you can't
grab onto.
From Girl with Curious Hair
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
When a solipsist dies ... everything goes with him.
From Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Death
Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Television
Fervent Christians are always remembering themselves as - and thus, by extension, judging everyone else outside their sect to be - lost and hopeless and just barely clinging to any kind of interior sense of value or reason or even to go on living, before they were 'saved.
From The Pale King
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Religion
Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.

The human beauty we're talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings' reconciliation with the fact of having a body.
From Both Flesh and Not: Essays
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Sports
I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture — a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It’s maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it’s not these things, quite. It’s more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I’m small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It’s wanting to jump overboard.
From A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Death
Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere Mary went, the lights became erratic.
From Infinite Jest
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Funny
Note the way "up close and personal" profiles of professional athletes strain so hard to find evidence of a rounded human life–outside interests and activities, values beyond the sport. We ignore what's obvious, that most of this straining is farce. It's farce because the realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one area of excellence. An ascetic focus. A subsumption of almost all other features of human life to one chosen talent and pursuit. A consent to live in a world that, like a child's world, is very small.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Sports
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 not there's a dog.
From Infinite Jest
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Funny
I'm so scared of dying without ever being really seen. Can you understand?
From Infinite Jest
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Death
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.
From This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Education
shall I spend much of your time pointing out the degree to which televisual values influence the contemporary mood of jaded weltschmerz, self-mocking materialism, blank indifference, and the delusion that cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive?
From A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Television
And with Letterman, Miller, Shandling, and Leno’s battery of hip, sardonic, this-is-
just-TV schticks, the circle back to the days of “We’ve just got to get Miss Ball on our show, Bud” has closed and come spiral, television’s power to jettison connection and castrate protest fueled by the very ironic
postmodern self-consciousness it had first helped fashion.
From E Unibus Pluram
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Television
Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.
From Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Philosophical
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.
From Infinite Jest
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Philosophical
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.
From Infinite Jest
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Philosophical
I’d tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Philosophical
The real, many-veiled answer to the question of just what goes through a great player's mind as he stands at the center of hostile crowd-noise and lines up the free-throw that will decide the game might well be: nothing at all.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Sports
How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?
From Infinite Jest
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Education
And that those who receive and act out the gift of athletic genius must, perforce, be blind and dumb about it — and not because blindness and dumbness are the price of the gift, but because they are its essence.
From How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart (A Story from Consider the Lobster): And Other Essays
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Sports
What if, when Tracy Austin writes that after her 1989 car crash, 'I quickly accepted that there was nothing I could do about it,' the statement is not only true but exhaustively descriptive of the entire acceptance process she went through?
From Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Sports
The integrity of my sleep has been forever compromised, sir.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Funny
Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Funny
Statisticians report that television is watched over six hours a day in the average American household. I don't know any fiction writers who live in average American households. I suspect Louise Erdrich might. Actually I have never seen an average American household. Except on TV.
From A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Television
Tell them there are no holes for your fingers in the masks of
men. Tell them how could you ever even hope to love what you can't
grab onto.
From Girl with Curious Hair
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
When a solipsist dies ... everything goes with him.
From Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Death
Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Television
Fervent Christians are always remembering themselves as - and thus, by extension, judging everyone else outside their sect to be - lost and hopeless and just barely clinging to any kind of interior sense of value or reason or even to go on living, before they were 'saved.
From The Pale King
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Religion
Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.

The human beauty we're talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings' reconciliation with the fact of having a body.
From Both Flesh and Not: Essays
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Sports
I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture — a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It’s maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it’s not these things, quite. It’s more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I’m small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It’s wanting to jump overboard.
From A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Death
Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere Mary went, the lights became erratic.
From Infinite Jest
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Funny
Note the way "up close and personal" profiles of professional athletes strain so hard to find evidence of a rounded human life–outside interests and activities, values beyond the sport. We ignore what's obvious, that most of this straining is farce. It's farce because the realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one area of excellence. An ascetic focus. A subsumption of almost all other features of human life to one chosen talent and pursuit. A consent to live in a world that, like a child's world, is very small.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Sports
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 not there's a dog.
From Infinite Jest
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Funny
I'm so scared of dying without ever being really seen. Can you understand?
From Infinite Jest
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Death
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.
From This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Education
shall I spend much of your time pointing out the degree to which televisual values influence the contemporary mood of jaded weltschmerz, self-mocking materialism, blank indifference, and the delusion that cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive?
From A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Television
And with Letterman, Miller, Shandling, and Leno’s battery of hip, sardonic, this-is-
just-TV schticks, the circle back to the days of “We’ve just got to get Miss Ball on our show, Bud” has closed and come spiral, television’s power to jettison connection and castrate protest fueled by the very ironic
postmodern self-consciousness it had first helped fashion.
From E Unibus Pluram
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Television
Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.
From Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Philosophical
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.
From Infinite Jest
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Philosophical
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.
From Infinite Jest
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Philosophical
I’d tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Philosophical
The real, many-veiled answer to the question of just what goes through a great player's mind as he stands at the center of hostile crowd-noise and lines up the free-throw that will decide the game might well be: nothing at all.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Sports
How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?
From Infinite Jest
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Education
And that those who receive and act out the gift of athletic genius must, perforce, be blind and dumb about it — and not because blindness and dumbness are the price of the gift, but because they are its essence.
From How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart (A Story from Consider the Lobster): And Other Essays
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Sports
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