David Foster Wallace citations

Page 4

“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.”

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

“I'm screaming for help and everybody's acting as if I'm singing Ethel Merman covers…”

“There are secrets within secrets, though--always.”

“The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.”

“The most dangerous thing about an academic education is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract thinking instead of simply paying attention to what’s going on in front of me.”

“That it is statistically easier for low-IQ people to kick an addiction than it is for high-IQ people… That boring activities become, perversely, much less boring if you concentrate intently on them.”

“She had a brainy girls discomfort about her own beauty and its effects on folks.”

“My worst character flaw that I'm conscious of is that I tend to think my way into circles instead of resolving anything. It's paralyzing and boring for people around me.”

“She took a sort of abject pride in her mecilessness toward herself.”

“There are very few innocent sentences in writing.”

“This is water.”

“… loneliness is not a function of solitude.”

“Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T true is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it.”

“The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at theduring the first eight pages.”

“And he wishes, in the cold quiet of his archer's heart, that he himself could feel the intensity of their reconciliations as strongly as he feels that of their battles.”

“Worship your body, beauty, and sexual allure and you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.”

“We are not dead but asleep, dreaming of ourselves.”

“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.”

“That what appears to be egoism so often isn't.”

“she committed suicide by putting her extremities down the garbage disposal-first one arm and then, kind of miraculously if you think about it, the other arm.”