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

— David Foster Wallace

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "I had kind of a midlife crisis at twenty which probably doesn’t augur well for my longevity" by David Foster Wallace?

David Foster Wallace 185

American fiction writer and essayist 1962–2008

Related quotes

“Women's liberation and the male midlife crisis were the same search--for personal fulfillment, common values, mutual respect, love. But while women's liberation was thought of as promoting identity, the male midlife crisis was thought of as an identity crisis.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part 1: The Myth of Male Power, p. 44.

““Tanner, are you insane?”
“Very probably several kinds of insane,” I said. “But I’m afraid it doesn’t change anything. I’m perfectly happy with my current delusional system.””

Alastair Reynolds book Chasm City

Source: Chasm City (2001), Chapter 27 (p. 454).

“Good in Crisis; Sucks at Normal.’ That about sums up my whole life, doesn’t it?”

Neal Shusterman (1962) American novelist

Source: UnSouled

“The intention was not in pursuit of corrupt ends or to use state resources to unduly benefit me and my family. Hence, I have agreed to pay for the identified items once a determination is made. There are lessons to be learned for all of us in government which augur well for governance in the future.”

Jacob Zuma (1942) 4th President of South Africa

Addressing the nation in response to the judgment of the Constitutional Court regarding irregularities by the Department of Public Works during the Nkandla project, and the powers of the Public Protector in this respect. Zuma: My actions were all in good faith http://city-press.news24.com/Voices/zuma-my-actions-were-all-in-good-faith-20160401, City Press (via News24), 1 April 2016

“It was the period of my mental progress which I have now reached that I formed the friendship which has been the honour and chief blessing of my existence, as well as the source of a great part of all that I have attempted to do, or hope to effect hereafter, for human improvement. My first introduction to the lady who, after a friendship of twenty years, consented to become my wife, was in 1830, when I was in my twenty-fifth and she in her twenty-third year.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873)
Source: https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/184/mode/1up p. 184

“In order to supply the defects of experience, we will have recourse to the probable conjectures of analogy, conclusions which we will bequeath to our posterity to be ascertained by new observations, which, if we augur rightly, will serve to establish our theory and to carry it gradually nearer to absolute certainty.”

Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728–1777) German mathematician, physicist and astronomer

The System of the World (1800)

“Well, I certainly was not going to study physics, and I knew I was not going to study biology, but I could have become a sociologist or an anthropologist. However, I found sociology a little soft. I think that somewhere in my mind, I probably already had the notion – which turned out to be right – that if I was going to be a social scientist of some kind, I would like a rigorous social science. The analytical aspect of economics already appealed to me. That must have been so. It was not really a matter of chance. But if my wife had said ‘oh, no, economics was terribly boring’, I would probably have found something else to do.”

Robert Solow (1924) American economist

in Karen Ilse Horn (ed.) Roads to Wisdom, Conversations With Ten Nobel Laureates in Economics (2009)

“The schizophrenic has had their window kicked in, the magician has got a body of law – probably most of it bollocks, it doesn’t matter. The magician’s got a system into which the alien information that will be pouring into him or her will be fitted.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

De Abaitua interview (1998)
Context: The schizophrenic has had their window kicked in, the magician has got a body of law – probably most of it bollocks, it doesn’t matter. The magician’s got a system into which the alien information that will be pouring into him or her will be fitted. They’ve got a filing cabinet, like the Qabalah, which is a filing cabinet for ideas. It divides the whole universe up into ten drawers. Any experience can be passed into one of the drawers. The schizophrenic is probably having exactly the same experience as the magician but has no context in which to understand it. … The schizophrenics I have known, the most evident thing about it is the interconnectedness of everything. That’s standard lunacy, it’s also standard magic. But with one of them, it is uncontrollable, you are lost in a world in which everything is obviously connected by symbolic threads. That is what the magician is seeking, to see these threads that connect things up. If you’ve got a system – even if it’s a completely made-up bogus system – then you’ve at least got a filing cabinet to sort this stuff into, you don’t have to get crushed under it.

“I had a heavy heart and an ugly head, a kind of impostume in my head, which I was very desirous to be unladen of.”

Robert Burton book The Anatomy of Melancholy

The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Democritus Junior to the Reader

“If I had been the kind of fellow who brooded when things went wrong, I probably would have gone out of my mind when Judge Landis ruled me out of baseball.”

Joe Jackson (1887–1951) American baseball player

This is the Truth! (1949)
Context: If I had been the kind of fellow who brooded when things went wrong, I probably would have gone out of my mind when Judge Landis ruled me out of baseball. I would have lived in regret. I would have been bitter and resentful because I felt I had been wronged. But I haven't been resentful at all. I thought when my trial was over that Judge Landis might have restored me to good standing. But he never did. And until he died I had never gone before him, sent a representative before him, or placed before him any written matter pleading my case. I gave baseball my best and if the game didn't care enough to see me get a square deal, then I wouldn't go out of my way to get back in it. Baseball failed to keep faith with me. When I got notice of my suspension three days before the 1920 season ended — it came on a rained-out day — it read that if found innocent of any wrongdoing, I would be reinstated. If found guilty, I would be banned for life. I was found innocent, and I was still banned for life.

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

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

David Foster Wallace 185

Related quotes

Related topics