David Foster Wallace: Trending quotes (page 2)

“Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself.”

“It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.”

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

“I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously.”

“In Caesars Palace is America conceived as a new kind of Rome: conqueror of its own people. An empire of self.”

“What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves, they've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.”

“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.”

“I had kind of a midlife crisis at twenty which probably doesn’t augur well for my longevity”

“There's good self-consciousness, and then there's toxic, paralyzing, raped-by-psychic-Bedouins self-consciousness.”

“Te Occidere Possunt Sed Te Edere Non Possunt Nefas Est" ("They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier").”

“Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.”

“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.”

“You have decided being scared is caused mostly by thinking.”

“And Lo, for the Earth was empty of Form, and void. And Darkness was all over the Face of the Deep. And We said: 'Look at that fucker Dance.”

“The thing about people who are truly and malignantly crazy: their real genius is for making the people around them think theyare crazy. In military science this is called Psy-Ops, for your info.”

“To be, in a word, unborable…. It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish”

“I'd like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time, instead of having to go back in my head and enjoy them.”

“I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I'm not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I…”

“I have filled 3 Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me.”