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David Foster Wallace Quotes

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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
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The integrity of my sleep has been forever compromised, sir.
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Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move.
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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
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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
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When a solipsist dies ... everything goes with him.
From Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
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Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies.
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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
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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
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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
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Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere Mary went, the lights became erratic.
From Infinite Jest
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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.
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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
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I'm so scared of dying without ever being really seen. Can you understand?
From Infinite Jest
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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
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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
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Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.
From Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
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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
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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
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I’d tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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 unfeigned.
From Infinite Jest
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.
From A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The integrity of my sleep has been forever compromised, sir.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When a solipsist dies ... everything goes with him.
From Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere Mary went, the lights became erratic.
From Infinite Jest
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I'm so scared of dying without ever being really seen. Can you understand?
From Infinite Jest
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.
From Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I’d tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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 unfeigned.
From Infinite Jest
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.
From A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The integrity of my sleep has been forever compromised, sir.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When a solipsist dies ... everything goes with him.
From Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere Mary went, the lights became erratic.
From Infinite Jest
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I'm so scared of dying without ever being really seen. Can you understand?
From Infinite Jest
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.
From Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I’d tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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 unfeigned.
From Infinite Jest
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.
From A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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