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David Foster Wallace Quotes

David Foster Wallace quotes

American Writer February 21, 1962 – December 12, 2008

TOP 10 David Foster Wallace quotes

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There are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. 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 myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting,... David Foster Wallace
Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it."[Q&A with Larry McCaffery, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1993, Vol. 13.2] David Foster Wallace
She would- never mind. She was his servant. Slave mentality. This was not the girl I asked to marry me. She was his slave and believed she knew only joy...where was my wife? What was this creature she stroked and sucked at... David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace quote: "Scenery is here. Wish you were beautiful."
Scenery is here. Wish you were beautiful. David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace quote: "The individual's right to pursue his own vision of the best..."
The individual's right to pursue his own vision of the best ration of pleasure to pain: utterly sacrosanct. David Foster Wallace
... ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother's soft hand on your cheek... David Foster Wallace
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? How do I ever actually know whether I'm bullshitting myself, morally speaking? David Foster Wallace
Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i. e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames. And yet... David Foster Wallace
The bus had a lavatory in the wayback rear, which no one ever made any attempt to use, and I remember consciously deciding to trust that the passengers had good reason for not using it instead of venturing in and discovering that reason for myself. David Foster Wallace
sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them. David Foster Wallace
The reality is that dying isn’t bad, but it takes forever. And that forever is no time at all. I know that sounds like a contradiction, or maybe just wordplay. What it really is, it turns out, is a matter of perspective. —David Foster Wallace “Good Old Neon” (2004) David Foster Wallace
I have this -- here’s this thing where it’s going to sound sappy to you. I have this unbelievably like five-year-old’s belief that art is just absolutely magic. And that good art can do things that nothing else in the solar system can do. And that the good stuff will survive, and get read, and that in the great winnowing process, the shit will sink and the good stuff will rise. David Foster Wallace
It’s a very American illness, the idea of giving yourself away entirely to the idea of working in order to achieve some sort of brass ring that usually involves people feeling some way about you – I mean, people wonder why we walk around feeling alienated and lonely and stressed out. David Foster Wallace
I miss everyone. I can remember being young and feeling a thing and identifying it as homesickness, and then thinking well now that’s odd, isn’t it, because I was home, all the time. What on earth are we to make of that? David Foster Wallace
The next suitable person you’re in light conversation with, you stop suddenly in the middle of the conversation and look at the person closely and say, “What’s wrong?” You say it in a concerned way. He’ll say, “What do you mean?” You say, “Something’s wrong. I can tell. What is it?” And he’ll look stunned and say, “How did you know?” He doesn’t realize something’s always wrong, with everybody. Often more than one thing. He doesn’t know everybody’s always going around all the time with... David Foster Wallace

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