David Foster Wallace
It was when I was the age where you can, as they say, "hear voices" without worrying that something is wrong with you. I "heard voices" all the time as a small child.Collection: Children
It's probably hard to feel any sort of Romantic spiritual connection to nature when you have to make your living from it.Collection: Spiritual
You have decided being scared is caused mostly by thinking.Collection: Thinking
One answer to why public interest in men's tennis has been on the wane in recent years is an essential and unpretty thugishness about the power-baseline style that's become dominant on the tour. Watch Agassi closely sometime...he's amazingly absent of finesse, with movements that look more like a heavy-metal musician's than an athlete's...what a top PBer really resembles is film of the old Soviet Union putting down a rebellion. It's awesome, but brutally so, with a grinding, faceless quality about its power that renders that power curiously dull and empty.Collection: Sports
Please learn the pragmatics of expressing fear: sometimes words that seem to express really invoke. This can be tricky.Collection: Sometimes
My whole life I've been a fraud. I'm not exaggerating. Pretty much all I've ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me in other people. Mostly to be liked or admired. It's a little more complicated than that, maybe. But when you come right down to it it's to be liked, loved. Admired, approved of, applauded, whatever. You get the idea.Collection: Ideas
But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars - compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things.Collection: Meaningful
...loneliness is not a function of solitude.Collection: Loneliness
No single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.Collection: Inspirational
My own terror of appearing sentimental is so strong that I’ve decided to fight against it, some; but the terror is still there. . . . Do you identify with a distaste/fear about sentimentality? Do you agree that, past a certain line, such distaste can turn everything arch and sneering and too ironic? Or do you have your own set of abstract questions to drive yourself nuts with?Collection: Strong
Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have much harder, more tedious or painful lives than I do, overall.Collection: People
Fiction, poetry, music...these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.Collection: Loneliness
It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most "familiarity" is meditated and delusive.Collection: Important
We all suffer alone in the real world. True empathy's impossible. But if a piece of fiction can alow us imaginatively to identify with a character's pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with their own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple.Collection: Pain
I'm not afraid of new things. I'm just afraid of feeling alone even when there's somebody else there. I'm afraid of feeling bad. Maybe that's selfish, but it's the way I feel.Collection: Selfish
You have to understand, writing a novel gets very weird and invisible-friend-from-childhood-ish. Then you kill that thing, which was never really alive except in your imagination, and you're supposed to go buy groceries and talk to people at parties and stuff.Collection: Party
There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact - in its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of social equality for social equality itself - of vastly more help to conservatives and the US status quo than traditional SNOOT prescriptions ever were.Collection: Reform
Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?Collection: Pain
To be a mass tourist, for me,...is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.Collection: Tourists
....there is an ending [to Infinite Jest] as far as I'm concerned. Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an "end" can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame. If no such convergence or projection occured to you, then the book's failed for you.Collection: Book
If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important - if you want to operate on your default-setting - then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying.Collection: Reality
There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship - be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles - is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.Collection: Mother
Think of the old cliché about ‘the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.’ This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head.Collection: Suicide
Hideous psychic fallout they'd all endured both in active marijuana-dependency and then in marijuana-detox: the social isolation, anxious lassitude, and the hyperself-consciousness that then reinforced the withdrawal and anxiety - the increasing emotional abstraction, poverty of affect, and then total emotional catalepsy - the obsessive analyzing, finally the paralytic stasis that results from obsessive analysis of all possible implications of both getting up from the couch and not getting up from the couch.Collection: Marijuana
...morning is the soul's night.Collection: Morning
I never, even for a moment, doubted what they’d told me. This is why it is that adults and even parents can, unwittingly, be cruel: they cannot imagine doubt’s complete absence. They have forgotten.Collection: Parent
There are very few innocent sentences in writing.Collection: Writing
Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?" "I give." "You get someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog.Collection: Dog
Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable.Collection: Writing
She took a sort of abject pride in her mecilessness toward herself.Collection: Pride
If you worship power, you will feel weak and afraid, needing ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay.Collection: Worship
I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I'm not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I.Collection: Crazy
I think it's easy to stop smoking; it's just hard not to commit a felony after you stop.Collection: Thinking
And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit "I don’t really mean what I’m saying." So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: "How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.Collection: Powerful
I don't think writers are any smarter than other people. I think they may be more compelling in their stupidity, or in their confusion.Collection: Thinking
I wish you way more than luck.Collection: Luck
I love the way you love, but I hate the way I'm supposed to love you back.Collection: Hate
Most of the writers I know are weird hybrids. There's a strong streak of egomania coupled with extreme shyness. Writing's kind of like exhibitionism in private. And there's also a strange loneliness, and a desire to have some kind of conversation with people, but not a real great ability to do it in person.Collection: Strong
...Genuine pathological openness is about as seductive as Tourette's Syndrome.Collection: Seductive
There is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness.Collection: Kindness
It's in the democratic citizen's nature to be like a leaf that doesn't believe in the tree it's part of.Collection: Inspirational
...the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.Collection: Reality
The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.Collection: Thinking
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says 'Morning, boys. How's the water?' And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes 'What the hell is water?'Collection: Morning
People, unless they're paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority.Collection: People
Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.Collection: Acceptance
Stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.Collection: Alive
Good literature makes your head throb heartlikeCollection: Literature
K--: 'When they say "I am my own person," "I do not need a man," "I am responsible for my own sexuality," they are actually telling you just what they want you to make them forget.Collection: Men