David Foster Wallace Quotes
Source: This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
Up, Simba
Essays
Variant: There is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.
Source: Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
Context: If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible psychological reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.
Source: The Broom of the System
“What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love?”
Source: Infinite Jest (1996)
Context: What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love? What if the temple comes to Mohammed? What if you just love? without deciding? You just do: you see her and in that instant are lost to sober account-keeping and cannot choose but to love?
“Hell hath no fury like a coolly received postmodernist.”
Source: Girl With Curious Hair
Source: The Pale King (2011)
Context: "Maybe it's not metaphysics. Maybe it's existential. I'm talking about the individual US citizen's deep fear, the same basic fear that you and I have and that everybody has except nobody ever talks about it except existentialists in convoluted French prose. Or Pascal. Our smallness, our insignificance and mortality, yours and mine, the thing that we all spend all our time not thinking about directly, that we are tiny and at the mercy of large forces and that time is always passing and that every day we've lost one more day that will never come back and our childhoods are over and our adolescence and the vigor of youth and soon our adulthood, that everything we see around us all the time is decaying and passing, it's all passing away, and so are we, so am I, and given how fast the first forty-two years have shot by it's not going to be long before I too pass away, whoever imagined that there was a more truthful way to put it than "die," "pass away," the very sound of it makes me feel the way I feel at dusk on a wintry Sunday--... And not only that, but everybody who knows me or even knows I exist will die, and then everybody who knows those people and might even conceivably have even heard of me will die, and so on, and the gravestones and monuments we spend money to have pour in to make sure we're remembered, these'll last what-- a hundred years? two hundred?-- and they'll crumble, and the grass and insects my decomposition will go to feed will die, and their offspring, or if I'm cremated the trees that are nourished by my windblown ash will die or get cut down and decay, and my urn will decay, and that before maybe three of four generations it will be like I never existed, not only will I have passed away but it will be like I was never here, and people in 2104 or whatever will no more think of Stuart A. Nichols Jr. than you or I think of John T. Smith, 1790 to 1864, of Livingston, Virginia, or some such. That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we're all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine, in fact, probably that's why the manic US obsession with production, produce, produce, impact the world, contribute, shape things, to help distract us from how little and totally insignificant and temporary we are... The post-production capitalist has something to do with the death of civics. But so does fear of smallness and death and everything being on fire."
Source: This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
“I'm just afraid of having a tombstone that says HERE LIES A PROMISING OLD MAN.”
Source: Infinite Jest
“Capital T-truth is about life before death.”
Source: This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
“Words and a book and a belief that the world is words…”
Source: The Broom of the System
“I wish you way more than luck.”
Source: This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
“life's endless war against the self you cannot live without.”
Source: Infinite Jest
“I don't want to hurt myself. I want to stop hurting.”
Source: Infinite Jest
“Everything I’ve ever let go of had claw marks on it.”
Variant: Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.
Source: Infinite Jest
“I'm screaming for help and everybody's acting as if I'm singing Ethel Merman covers…”
Source: Infinite Jest
“There are secrets within secrets, though--always.”
Source: The Pale King
Source: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
Source: This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
“She had a brainy girls discomfort about her own beauty and its effects on folks.”
Source: Infinite Jest
“She took a sort of abject pride in her mecilessness toward herself.”
Source: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
Source: This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
“… loneliness is not a function of solitude.”
Source: Infinite Jest
Source: This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
“We are not dead but asleep, dreaming of ourselves.”
Source: The Pale King
Source: Infinite Jest (1996)
Context: 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.
