David Foster Wallace Quotes - Page 4

What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.

And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit "I don’t really mean what I’m saying." So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: "How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.

There is no hatred in my love for you. Only a sadness I feel all the more strongly for my inability to explain or describe it.

Most of the writers I know are weird hybrids. There's a strong streak of egomania coupled with extreme shyness. Writing's kind of like exhibitionism in private. And there's also a strange loneliness, and a desire to have some kind of conversation with people, but not a real great ability to do it in person.

I am not what you see and hear.

It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.

I don't think writers are any smarter than other people. I think they may be more compelling in their stupidity, or in their confusion.

There is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness.

It's in the democratic citizen's nature to be like a leaf that doesn't believe in the tree it's part of.

I love the way you love, but I hate the way I'm supposed to love you back.

The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.

...Genuine pathological openness is about as seductive as Tourette's Syndrome.

I wish you way more than luck.

...the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.

Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.

People, unless they're paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority.

Good literature makes your head throb heartlike

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says 'Morning, boys. How's the water?' And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes 'What the hell is water?'

K--: 'When they say "I am my own person," "I do not need a man," "I am responsible for my own sexuality," they are actually telling you just what they want you to make them forget.

The severing of an established connection is exponentially more painful than the rejection of an attempted connection.

Stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.

To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.

Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties - all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion - these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.

Certain sincerely devout and spiritually advanced people believe that the God of their understanding helps them find parking places and gives them advice on Mass. Lottery numbers.

Almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it.