David Foster Wallace Quotes - Page 10

One answer to why public interest in men's tennis has been on the wane in recent years is an essential and unpretty thugishness about the power-baseline style that's become dominant on the tour. Watch Agassi closely sometime...he's amazingly absent of finesse, with movements that look more like a heavy-metal musician's than an athlete's...what a top PBer really resembles is film of the old Soviet Union putting down a rebellion. It's awesome, but brutally so, with a grinding, faceless quality about its power that renders that power curiously dull and empty.

There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration.

a large percentage of bright young men and women locate the impetus behind their career choice in the belief that they are fundamentally different from the common run of man, unique and in certain crucial ways superior, more as it were central, meaningful - what else could explain the fact that they themselves have been at the exact center of all they've experienced for the whole 20 years of their conscious lives? - and that they can and will make a difference in their chosen field simply by the fact of their unique and central presence to it...

The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates.

'This thing I feel, I can't name it straight out but it seems important, do you feel it too?' — this sort of direct question is not for the squeamish. For one thing, it's perilously close to 'Do you like me? Please like me,' which you know quite well that 99% of all the interhuman manipulation and bullshit gamesmanship that goes on goes on precisely because the idea of saying this sort of thing straight out is regarded as somehow obscene.

sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them.

I believe I want adult sanity, which seems to me the only unalloyed form of heroism available today.

...we live in an era of terrible preoccupation with presentation and interpretation, one in which relations between who someone is and what he believes and how he "expresses himself" have been thrown into big time flux.

One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.

Please learn the pragmatics of expressing fear: sometimes words that seem to express really invoke. This can be tricky.

I have always tried to avoid talking to pretty girls, because pretty girls have a vicious effect on me in which every part of my brain is shut down except for the part that says unbelievably stupid things and the part that is aware that I am saying unbelievably stupid things.

Say the whole point of love is to try to get your fingers through the holes in the lover's mask. To get some kind of hold on the mask, and who cares how you do it.

One paradox of professional writing is that books written solely for money and/or acclaim will almost never be good enough to garner either.

Kafka's evocations are, rather, unconscious and almost sub-archetypal, the little-kid stuff from which myths derive; this is why we tend to call even his weirdest stories nightmarish rather than surreal.

When I say or write something, there are actually a whole lot of different things I am communicating. The propositional content (i.e., the verbal information I'm trying to convey) is only one part of it. Another part is stuff about me, the communicator. Everyone knows this. It's a function of the fact there are so many different well-formed ways to say the same basic thing, from e.g. "I was attacked by a bear!" to "Goddamn bear tried to kill me!" to "That ursine juggernaut did essay to sup upon my person!" and so on.

My whole life I've been a fraud. I'm not exaggerating. Pretty much all I've ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me in other people. Mostly to be liked or admired. It's a little more complicated than that, maybe. But when you come right down to it it's to be liked, loved. Admired, approved of, applauded, whatever. You get the idea.

It now lately sometimes seemed a black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe.

It was when I was the age where you can, as they say, "hear voices" without worrying that something is wrong with you. I "heard voices" all the time as a small child.

Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he's devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It's hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.

I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it.

Footnote: 79) The anchor is gigantic and must weigh a hundred tons, and -- delightfully -- it really is anchor-shaped, i.e. the same shape as anchors in tattoos.

The reason ... our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down.

This is so American, man: either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it.

This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn't engage anybody.

These worst mornings with cold floors and hot windows and merciless light - the soul's certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer.