David Foster Wallace: Trending quotes (page 5)

“Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.”

“I'm just afraid of having a tombstone that says HERE LIES A PROMISING OLD MAN.”

“Capital T-truth is about life before death.”

“Words and a book and a belief that the world is words…”

“All I'm saying is that it's shortsighted to blame TV. It's simply another symptom. TV didn't invent our aesthetic childishness here any more than the Manhattan Project invented aggression.”

“I wish you way more than luck.”

“life's endless war against the self you cannot live without.”

“I don't want to hurt myself. I want to stop hurting.”

“American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.”

“Everything I’ve ever let go of had claw marks on it.”

“Our attachments are our temple, what we worship, no? What we give ourselves to, what we invest with faith…. Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care.”

“When a solipsist dies… everything goes with him.”

“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.”

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

“I am concentrating docilely on the question why U. S. restrooms always appear to us as infirmaries for public distress, the place to reagain control.”

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

“It's all very confusing. I think I'm very honest and candid, but I'm also proud of how honest and candid I am -- so where does that put me?”

“To experience commitment as the loss of options, a type of death, the death of childhood's limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress-this will happen, mark me. Childhood's end.”

“Look. Listen. Use ears I'd be proud to call our own. Listen to the silence behind the engines' noise. Jesus, Sweets,. Hear it? It's a love song.

For whom?

You are loved.”