David Foster Wallace
That what appears to be egoism so often isn't.Collection: Egoism
Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved.Collection: Loneliness
When a solipsist dies ... everything goes with him.Collection: Dies
Entertainment provides relief. Art provokes engagement.Collection: Art
I like the fans’ sound at night. Do you? It’s like somebody big far away goes like: it’sOKit’sOKit’sOKit’sOK, over and over. From very far away.Collection: Night
The Sophists had this idea: Forget this idea of what's true or not—what you want to do is rhetoric; you want to be able to persuade the audience and have the audience think you're smart and cool. And Socrates and Plato, basically their whole idea is, "Bullshit. There is such a thing as truth, and it's not all just how to say what you say so that you get a good job or get laid, or whatever it is people think they want.Collection: Jobs
So which is the lie? Hard or soft? Silence or time?Collection: Lying
Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move.Collection: Moving
I find in myself a need to get very away.Collection: Needs
You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice.Collection: Thinking
Keep in mind that a language is both a map of the world and its own world, with its own shadowlands and crevasses - places where statements that seem to obey all the language's rules are nevertheless impossible to deal with.Collection: Mind
I knew my limitations and the limitations of the courts I played on, and adjusted thusly. I was at my best in bad conditions.Collection: Court
Molly Notkin often confides on the phone to Joelle van Dyne about the one tormented love of Nokin's life thus far, an erotically circumscribed G.W. Pabst scholar at New York University tortured by the neurotic compulsion that there are only a finite number of erections possible in the world at any one time and that his tumescence means e.g. the detumescence of some perhaps more deserving or tortured Third World sorghum farmer.Collection: New York
the psychological need to believe that others take you as seriously as you take yourself. There is nothing particularly wrong with it, as psychological needs go, but yet of course we should always remember that a deep need for anything from other people makes us easy pickings.Collection: Believe
Dostoevsky wrote fiction about identity, moral value, death, will, sexual vs. spiritual love, greed, freedom, obsession, reason, faith, suicide. And he did it without ever reducing his characters to mouthpieces or his books to tracts. His concern was always what it is to be a human being—that is, how to be an actual *person*, someone whose life is informed by values and principles, instead of just an especially shrewd kind of self-preserving animal.Collection: Suicide
There are no choices without personal freedom, Buckeroo. It's not us who are dead inside. These things you find so weak and contemptible in us - these are just the hazards of being free.Collection: Choices
There are secrets within secrets, though--always.Collection: Secret
Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty.Collection: Sports
Words and a book and a belief that the world is words.Collection: Book
My bones are ringing the way sometimes people say their ears are ringing, I'm so tired.Collection: Tired
I wasn't all that attracted to writing originally. I read a great deal. My parents read a great deal. I do know that as my interest in tennis waned, my interest in academics increased. I mean, I started doing my homework in high school and discovering that it was somewhat fun. And then in college I barely even played on the team because just classes were much more interesting.Collection: Fun
The entire ball game, in terms of both the exam and life, was what you gave attention to vs. what you willed yourself to not.Collection: Games
I will probably write an hour a day and spend eight hours a day biting my knuckle and worrying about not writing.Collection: Writing
I was always either so unreasonably and pointlessly happy that no one place could seem to contain me, or so melancholy, so sick and silly with sadness that there was no place I could stomach the thought of entering. I hated it here. And I have never been as happy as when I was here. And these two things together confront me with the beak and claws of the True.Collection: Silly
He didn't reject the idea so much as not react to it and watch as it floated away. He thought very broadly of desires and ideas being watched but not acted upon, he thought of impulses being starved of expression and dying out and floating dryly away.Collection: Expression
So yo then man what's your story?Collection: Men
When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces. The man who'd introduced them didn't much like either of them, though he acted as if he did, anxious as he was to preserve good relations at all times. One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one.Collection: Home
I'm screaming for help and everybody's acting as if I'm singing Ethel Merman covers.Collection: Singing
For me, boviscopophobia is an even stronger motive than semi-agoraphobia for staying on the ship when we're in port.Collection: Travel
...the sun would leave my sky if I couldn't assume you'd simply come and tell me you were sad.Collection: Sky
If you've never wept and want to, have a child.Collection: Children
I had four hundred thousand pages of continental philosophy and lit theory in my head. And by God, I was going to use it to prove to him that I was smarter than he was.Collection: Philosophy
I submit that tennis is the most beautiful sport there is and also the most demanding. It requires body control, hand-eye coordination, quickness, flat-out speed, endurance, and that weird mix of caution and abandon we call courage. It also requires smarts. Just one single shot in one exchange in one point of a high-level match is a nightmare of mechanical variables.Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Support
In this country we're unprecedentedly safe, comfortable, and well fed, with more and better venues for stimulation. And yet if you were asked, 'Is this a happy or unhappy country?' you'd check the 'unhappy' box. We're living in an era of emotional poverty, which is something that serious drug addicts feel most keenly.Collection: Country
The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the wall, during the first eight pages.Collection: Jobs
It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again.Collection: Lovely
life's endless war against the self you cannot live without.Collection: War
Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.Collection: Girl
What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human [...] is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.Collection: Cynical
In fact, the likeliest reason why so many of us care so little about politics is that modern politicians makes us sad, hurt us deep down in ways that are hard even to name, much less talk about.Collection: Hurt
And meteorologists have nothing to tell people in Philo, who know perfectly well that the real story is that to the west, between us and the Rockies, there is basically nothing tall, and that weird zephyrs and stirs joined breezes and gusts and thermals and downdrafts and whatever out over Nebraska and Kansas and moved like streams into rivers and jets at and military fronts that gathered like avalanches and roared in reverse down pioneer oxtrails, toward our own personal unsheltered asses.Collection: Military
I'd tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hearCollection: Sound
Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere Mary went, the lights became erratic.Collection: Light
Fiction is about what it is to be a human being.Collection: Fiction
This appetite to choose death by pleasure if it is available to choose - this appetite of your people unable to choose appetites, this is the death.Collection: People
Everything gets horrible. Everything you see gets ugly. Lurid is the word. Doctor Garton said lurid, one time. That's the right word for it. And everything sounds harsh, spiny and harsh sounding, like every sound you hear all of a sudden has teeth. And smelling like I smell bad even after I just got out of the shower. It's like what's the point of washing if everything smells like I need another showerCollection: Smell
[I]f the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is.Collection: Jobs
This is nourishing, redemptive we become less alone inside.Collection: Redemption