FastSaying

Think of the old cliché about the mind being 'an excellent servant but a terrible master'. This, like many clichés, so lame & banal on the surface, actually expresses a great & terrible truth.


David Foster Wallace

  Email Quote to Friends   Link to Quote   Create Short URL  Publish Text About This Quote   Share on Facebook, Twitter, and more
  See Recommended Quotes For You

Related

The press, like fire, is an excellent servant, but a terrible master.
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER Money is a terrible master but an excellent servant.
P. T. (PHINEAS TAYLOR) BARNUM Money is a terrible master but an excellent servant.
PHINEAS TAYLOR BARNUM Money is a terrible master but an excellent servant.
P.T. BARNUM Money is a terrible master but an excellent servant
P.T. BARNUM the mind is a wonderfull servant, but a terrible master
ROBIN SHARMA Money is in some respects life's fire: it is a very excellent servant, but a terrible master.
P. T. BARNUM It is a misfortune that necessity has induced men to accord greater license to this formidable engin...
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER It is a misfortune that necessity has induced men to accord greater license to this formidable engin...
JAMES F. COOPER Money is an excellent servant, but a horrible master.
UNKNOWN The process of a date, I think, is terrible. Horrible. Because everything is banal and predicted.
MIUCCIA PRADA David (David Foster Wallace) had a caffeine social gift: Her was charmingly, vividly, overwhelmingly...
DAVID LIPSKY She wasn't bitter. She was sad, though. But it was a hopeful kind of sad. The kind of sad that just ...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY So, I guess we are who we are for alot of reasons. And maybe we'll never know most of them. But even...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY I love my mom so much. I don't care if that's corny to say. I think on my next birthday, I'm going t...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY We Are All Infinite
STEPHEN CHBOSKY You can't just sit there and put everyone's lives ahead of yours and think that counts as love. You ...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY I saw other people there. Old men sitting alone. Young girls with blue eye shadow and awkward jaws. ...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY That one moment when you know you are not a sad story. You are ALIVE.
STEPHAN CHBOSKY Somos quienes somos por un montón de razones.Quizás nunca conozcamos la mayoría de ellas.Pero aun...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY Ambos dijeron que tomara asiento y parecían hablar en serio, así que me senté.
STEPHEN CHBOSKY I know these will all be stories some day, and our pictures will become old photographs. We all beco...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY So I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybewe'll never know most of them.
STEPHEN CHBOSKY So I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we'll never know most of them.
STEPHEN CHBOSKY There's nothing like the deep breathes after laughing that hard. Nothing in the world like a sore st...
STHEPHEN CHBOSKY no more pencils, no more books, no more teachers' dirty looks, when the teacher rings the bell, drop...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY I don't know the significance of this, but I find it very interesting.
STEPHEN CHBOSKY Maybe it’s sad that these are now memories. And maybe it’s not sad.
STEPHEN CHBOSKY The character who was like me he died at 46, even it was 2008 year so far his name was David Foster ...
DEYTH BANGER You appear to me not to have understood the nature of my body & mind. Partly from ill-health, &a...
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE I'm not saying that television is vulgar and dumb because the people who compose the Audience are vu...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE I was very grateful to have heard it again. Because I guess we all forget sometimes. And I think eve...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we'll never know most of them. But even if...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY The idea is to believe me... but as far as I see the world... to believe is a sin... to trust me one...
DEYTH BANGER Goodness & love are as real as their terrible opposites, and, in truth, far more real, though I ...
SHELDON VANAUKEN You must save what you can of your life; you musn't lose it all simply because you've lost a part.
HENRY JAMES But I think it is so important to not rush the process of grief- & I do not mean moping & wa...
ASHLEY NIKOLE An incredible reporter and a great writer, but he had a terrible stutter, a terrible stutter.
WALTER CRONKITE A great future starts with what you can see
SOTONYE ANGA I was suddenly very aware of the fact it was me standing up in that tunnel with the wind over my fac...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY The only perspective is to really be there.
STEPHEN CHBOSKY I didn't feel like reading that night, so I went downstairs and watched a half-hour long commercial ...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY Sir Hamish Graham has many of the qualities & most of the failings that result from being born t...
JEFFREY ARCHER Your mind is a Microcosm of strength and power. There’s all the magic you need in it. When all els...
CHINONYE J. CHIDOLUE Stephen King is Cervantes compared with David Foster Wallace. We have no standards left.
HAROLD BLOOM One time I was standing on a corner in Chicago & a man stopped his car & asked for direction...
BRIAN ANDREAS The fact is that nothing is more difficult to believe than the truth; conversely, nothing seduces li...
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFóN The reason why time plays a great part in so many of my tales is that this element looms up in my mi...
H. P. LOVECRAFT The problem with taking amps to a shop is that they come back sounding like another amp.
STEVIE RAY VAUGHAN Supongo que ser tímido significa básicamente estar absorbido por uno mismo hasta el punto de que s...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE I've been & am absurdly over-estimated. There are no supermen & I'm quite ordinary, ...
T. E. LAWRENCE (All the grief she had suffered over her lifetime had moulded her face into a mask of eternal sadnes...
JEAN SASSON The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers & cities; but to know someone who ...
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE I like it. I might be the only person, but I do like it. The timing's terrible, but I think it's a g...
JERRY NARRON I like writers who seem to write because they have to. You get the feeling of this burning desire to...
PATRICK NESS I just want you to know that you’re very special… and the only reason I’m telling you is that ...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY I thought I would write a love letter. But then, I wrote a book." - Suzy Davies, on "Johari's Window
SUZY DAVIES There's a flame of magic inside every stone & every flower, every bird that sings & every fr...
KATE FORSYTH Interstiality is a theme that is simultaneously genuinely interesting and potentially quite useful, ...
CHINA MIéVILLE There’s a Chinese proverb that says “Wisdom is avoiding all thoughts that weaken you & embra...
PABLO Money is a great servant but a bad master.
FRANCIS BACON The reality is that dying isn’t bad, but it takes forever. And that forever is no time at all. I k...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE We begin to fight. The wind and I. Horns locked. Battling each other with elements.
LAURA DOCKRILL Shackleton's unwillingness to succumb to the demands of everyday life & his insatiable excitemen...
ALFRED LANSING I know many beautiful people and their lives are just so terrible. They feel so uncomfortable with t...
MONICA BELLUCCI In an era where women undress their outfits & give their bodies so carelessly, become the rare w...
NIKKI ROWE Now instead of lugging an old amp around, you can lug a PowerBook around,
STEVE JOBS All religions, in their pure form, will tell you God is Love. And power, fear, division, judgment, o...
THE TRUTH When you look back with regret, that (regret, loss) becomes your focus.
Then your focus direct...
THE TRUTH The 'all for me and only me' mentality is the most destructive force on earth.
THE TRUTH When you look back with regret, that (regret, loss) becomes your focus.
Then your focus direct...
THE TRUTH We need not fear death, for it is simply the next phase of life. We never die, we simply change form...
THE TRUTH Any perceived 'rejection' is simply a 're-direction'.
THE TRUTH Without awareness, every one of us is at risk of living trapped, an unfulfilled trace of our self, b...
THE TRUTH I like a lot of old-school R&B, soul, and classic rock.
WIZ KHALIFA You think terrible things happened on the battlefields, but terrible things happened in ordinary sub...
LIANE MORIARTY I wanted more of those sweltering kisses. I felt terrible about that. But the warm sunny fragrance o...
LISA KLEYPAS I'm ashamed and embarrassed to say that I've read very little of David Foster Wallace's ...
BEN FOUNTAIN This used to be a mean monster until he got sick one winter with the flu & stayed in bed & w...
BRIAN ANDREAS You know, it is a terrible thing to appear on television, because people think that you actually kno...
DAVID ATTENBOROUGH Better to go than sit around being a terrible old bore.
AUBERON WAUGH After years of working with missionaries, I am tempted to conclude that their endeavors merely prolo...
DAVID MITCHELL Writers such as Richard Powers and the late David Foster Wallace have shown the path to a newer gene...
GILES FODEN I've only read a few chapters of this book, Trumpet Blast Warning but it's amazing. All of his state...
JASON CARTER Our mind is a wonderful place, people, aspirations, desires & things can walk-in any time, but i...
SHAHENSHAHHK I've heard it said that God is in the details. It's the same with the truth. Leave out the details, ...
LIBBA BRAY The truth is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with great caution.
JACK THORNE Well, you can't know it without something having been sneezed.
A.A. MILNE We'll be Friends Forever, won't we, Pooh?' asked Piglet.
Even longer,' Pooh answered.”
...
A.A. MILNE Is there a lot of stuff you don't understand? she said & I said pretty much the whole thing &...
BRIAN ANDREAS I'm in R&B/Soul, and I feel like all my music is R&B driven. Even some of the songs that...
BRYSON TILLER I'm a terrible lover. I've actually given a woman an anti-climax.
SCOTT ROEBEN I have a screened in porch, and it's nice to curl up with a book outside when it's raining, ...
AMANDA HOCKING The truth. It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and must therefore be treated with great caution.
J. K. ROWLING Put my head under my pillow, and let the quiet put things where they are supposed to be.
STEPHEN CHBOSKY He said it was the kind of book you made your own.
STEPHEN CHBOSKY No hay nada como respirar hondo después de reírte tanto. Nada en el mundo como el dolor de estóma...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY Sam dropped me off. When she was too far away to see me, I started to cry again. Because she was my ...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY [Talking about Monte Rissell] ...and like Ed Kemper he was able to convince the psychiatrist he was ...
JOHN E. DOUGLAS Think about the work you already do. Is it meaningful & challenging? Are you appreciated & r...
MANI S. SIVASUBRAMANIAN

More David Foster Wallace

Nothing brings you together like a common enemy.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE It looks like you can write a minimalist piece without much bleeding. And you can. But not a good on...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE The assumption that you everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer c...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?"

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE The great myth is that the bad ones don't last long.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a p...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE If Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE For these cultures, getting rid of the pain without addressing the deeper cause would be like shutti...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Some people, from what I've seen, boo, when they lie, they become very still and centered and their ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE It's weird to feel like you miss someone you're not even sure you know.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE What TV is extremely good at - and realize that this is 'all it does' - is discerning what l...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being aro...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most 'familiarity' is meditated ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people like and depend on the ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE To be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I'm scared about how...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for th...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, m...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE The older Mario gets, the more confused he gets about the fact that everyone at E.T.A. over the age ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from ev...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the fla...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barel...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE ...when he kneels at other times and prays or meditates or tries to achieve a Big-Picture spiritual ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE I claim that the fact that we are strongly encouraged to identify with characters for whom death is ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE The 46-year-old recipient of the Jarvik IX Exterior Artificial Heart was actively window shopping in...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE The next suitable person you’re in light conversation with, you stop suddenly in the middle of the...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE At least part of the reason I am a SNOOT is that for years my mom brainwashed us in all sort of subt...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE I balked at trying antidepressants, I just couldn't see myself taking pills to try to be less of a f...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE I think serious art is supposed to make us confront things that are difficult in ourselves and in th...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establis...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE That as people age, accumulate more and more private experiences, their sense of history tightens, n...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE It’s got something to do with love. With having the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Maybe it's the fact the most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older pe...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE I think there must be probably different types of suicides. I'm not one of the self-hating ones. The...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE I am not what you see and hear.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain w...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE What I know about auto racing could be inscribed with a dry Magic Marker on the lip of a Coke bottle...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Statisticians report that television is watched over six hours a day in the average American househo...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE I think the world divides neatly into those who are excited by the managed induction of terror and t...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Organized shuffleboard has always filled me with dread. Everything about it suggests infirm senescen...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Part of the reason I actually preferred Twin Peaks's second season to its first was the fascinating ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE There is something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that's unbearably sad. Like most unbearably sad...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Because of the way human beings relate to narrative, we tend to identify with those characters we fi...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE shall I spend much of your time pointing out the degree to which televisual values influence the con...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE One of the few things I still miss from my Midwest childhood was this weird, deluded but unshakable ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE I submit that the real reason we criticized and disliked Lynch's Laura's muddy bothness is that it r...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE ....basically the sort of guy who looks entirely at home in sockless white loafers and a mint-green ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE AN ACADEMIC DEFINITION of Lynchian might be that the term "refers to a particular kind of irony wher...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE I have pointed rhythmically at the ceiling to the two-four beat of the same disco music I hated poin...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE From the line, watching, three things are striking: (a) what on TV is a brisk crack is here a whoomi...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE In school I ended up writing three different papers on "The Castaway" section of Moby-Dick, the chap...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Can you "choose" something when you are forcefully and enthusiastically immersed in it at an ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Footnote: 79) The anchor is gigantic and must weigh a hundred tons, and -- delightfully -- it really...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp an...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE I have felt as bleak as I've felt since puberty, and have filled almost three Mead notebooks trying ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE I think the world divides neatly into those who are excited by the managed induction of terror and t...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE I have now seen sucrose beaches and water a very bright blue. I have seen an all-red leisure suit wi...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE How can even the idea of rebellion against corporate culture stay meaningful when Chrysler Inc. adve...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut off; David Lynch is intereste...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE I have filled 3 Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please cou...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE When I say or write something, there are actually a whole lot of different things I am communicating...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the diale...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE ...we live in an era of terrible preoccupation with presentation and interpretation, one in which re...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE What if, when Tracy Austin writes that after her 1989 car crash, 'I quickly accepted that there was ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Who are we to say getting incested or abused or violated or any of those things can’t have their p...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE This story ["The Depressed Person"] was the most painful thing I ever wrote. It's about narcissism, ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE If what's always distinguished bad writing--flat characters, a narrative world that's clichéd and n...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Why not? Why not? Why not not, then, if the best reasoning you can contrive is why not?
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE There are no choices without personal freedom, Buckeroo. It's not us who are dead inside. These thin...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE If, by the virtue of charity or the circumstance of desperation, you ever chance to spend a little t...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE --and then you're in serious trouble, very serious trouble, and you know it, finally, deadly serious...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millenial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal em...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Mediocrity is contextual.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere Mary went, the lights became errat...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Are we not all of us fanatics? I say only what you of the U.S.A. pretend you do not know. Attachment...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE ... That no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent s...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty much...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE You can be shaped, or you can be broken. There is not much in between. Try to learn. Be coachable. T...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE The thing about people who are truly and malignantly crazy: their real genius is for making the peop...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE [...] almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE And Lo, for the Earth was empty of Form, and void. And Darkness was all over the Face of the Deep. A...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE ...logical validity is not a guarantee of truth.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Te Occidere Possunt Sed Te Edere Non Possunt Nefas Est" ("They can kill you, but the legalities of e...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really h...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom t...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE I am also concerned not to come off as shrill or preachy when what I really am is more like confused...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE I have always tried to avoid talking to pretty girls, because pretty girls have a vicious effect on ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE All I'm saying is that it's shortsighted to blame TV. It's simply another symptom. TV didn't invent ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE it turned out that there was something terribly stressful about visual telephone interfaces that had...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE It is named the "Web" for good reason.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE You see parents as kind or unkind or happy or miserable or drunk or sober or great or near-great or ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE When a solipsist dies ... everything goes with him.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE But the young educated adults of the 90s -- who were, of course, the children of the same impassione...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal e...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE ...most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE I had kind of a midlife crisis at twenty which probably doesn’t augur well for my longevity
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE An ad that pretends to be art is -- at absolute best -- like somebody who smiles warmly at you only ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE It now lately sometimes seemed a black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Suppose I were to give you a key ring [...] with a hundred keys, and I were to tell you that one of ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Nel momento in cui riconosceva quello che c'era su una cartuccia provava la sensazione carica d'ansi...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Someone who had authority, or should have had authority and did not exercise authority. I do not kno...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Because we’ve been lied to and lied to, and it hurts to be lied to. It’s ultimately just about t...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Why do prostitutes when they get straight always try and get so prim? It's like long-repressed libra...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Every love story is a ghost story.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Ortho Stice played with a kind of rigid, liquid grace, like a panther in a back-brace.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE He said he didn’t think Lenore should go to the G.O.D.
"Nobody ever finds anybody in a place ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Every two or three generations the world gets vastly different, and the context in which you have to...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE It's no accident that in a bureaucracy getting fired is called 'termination,' as in ontological eras...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Trite though it (used to) sound, real sexuality is about our struggles to connect with one another, ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE This is the kind of paradox, I think, of what it is to be a halfway intelligent American right now, ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE I am about art here, not simple reproduction.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE TV's 'real' agenda is to be 'liked,' because if you like what you're seeing,...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE And I was -- this is just how I was afraid you'd take it. I knew it, that you'd think this means you...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Almost anyone who loves tennis and follows the men’s tour on television has, over the last few yea...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Life is like tennis. Those who serve best usually win.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE The real, many-veiled answer to the question of just what goes through a great player's mind as he s...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE LaMont, the truth is that the world is incredibly, incredibly, unbelievably old. You suffer with the...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Nel tennis il vero avversario, la frontiera che include, è il giocatore stesso. C'è sempre e solo ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE My chest bumps like a dryer with shoes in it.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE This wise old whiskery fish swims up to three young fish and goes, 'Morning, boys, how's the water?'...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE You want to know the story? I'd be happy to tell you. I think I have just enough caloric energy stor...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Huh. Well you and I just disagree. Maybe the world just feels differently to us. This is all going b...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Trying to be anti-cool is just one exponent off trying to be cool -- it's the same beast.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Then he looked up, despite all best prior intentions. In four minutes, it would be another hour; a h...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE ...you are excused from doing the work of constructing the fantasy. The ads do it for you. The ads, ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picay...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Advertising that makes fun of itself is so powerful because it
implicitly congratulates both it...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE This appetite to choose death by pleasure if it is available to choose - this appetite of your peopl...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Lenore, it's simply that I love you. You know that. Every fiber of your being is loved by every fibe...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Supongo que ser tímido significa básicamente estar absorbido por uno mismo hasta el punto de que s...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE If you can think of times in your life that you've treated people with extraordinary decency and lov...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Eyes the broad-shouldered faceless character that symbolizes Men’s Room, does Sternberg, and strug...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE When something large and oncoming passed, the windshield's big rectangle was for a moment incandesce...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE I am fortunately an entirely handsome devil and appear even younger than twenty-nine. I look like a ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE But and so things are slow, and like you they have this irritating suspicion that any real satisfact...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Sometimes, when I don't think about it, I think I have just totally escaped the Bad Thing, and that ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE If I’m hanging out with you, I can’t even tell whether I like you or not because I’m too worri...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE I'm not saying that television is vulgar and dumb because the people who compose the Audience are vu...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE JAY: No really. Be secure. Pretend I'm a sperm cell. Here. I take the string out of the... hood of m...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE The reasons that center on others are easy to manipulate. All hollow things are light.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms nearly always shoo...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Te occidere possunt sed te edere possunt nefas est.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Il suicidio è così contrario a tanti nostri istinti e impulsi programmati che nessuno sano di ment...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Blue Springs Memorial Hospital Palliative Care Unit, Independence, Mo.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE The truth is you've already heard this. That this is what it's like. That it's what makes room for t...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE It is a fact of life that certain people are corrosive to others’ self esteem simply as a function...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE She smelled of talcum powder and Big Red.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE It's not that words or human language stop having any meaning or relevance after you die, by the way...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE ...this was depressing, much the way discovering that somebody is easy to manipulate is always a lit...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE The fraud part of me was always there, just as a puzzle piece, objectively speaking, is a true piece...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE I don't think he was used to patients who were already aware of what their real problem was. He was ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE The almost-35-year-old Terry Schmidt had very nearly nothing left anymore of the delusion that he di...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE -when he thinks of the starry-eyed puerility and narcissism of these fantasies now, a rough decade l...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE *One clue that there’s something not quite real about sequential time the way you experience it i...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Atwater knew — as did everyone at Style, though by some strange unspoken consensus it was never sa...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE The reality is that dying isn’t bad, but it takes forever. And that forever is no time at all. I k...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE (..)-Dr. G. would later say that the whole "my whole life flashed before me" phenomenon at the end i...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Even as I wrote my note to Fern, for instance, expressing sentiments and regrets that were real, a p...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE If I understand you right,' he says, 'you're saying that you're basically a calculating manipulative...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE It is a fact of life that certain people are corrosive to others' self esteem simply as a function o...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE What teachers and the administration in that era never seemed to see was that the mental work of wha...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE The truth is you already know what it's like. You already know the difference between the size and s...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Hell hath no fury like a coolly received postmodernist.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE You know, the whole thing about perfectionism. The perfectionism is very dangerous. Because of cours...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE When he smoked marijuana he tended to masterbate a great deal.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE I like the fans’ sound at night. Do you? It’s like somebody big far away goes like: it’sOKit�...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Here is how to turn down an extramural date so you won't be asked again. Say something like I'm terr...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfi...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE This, of course, is because today’s postfeminist era is also today’s postmodern era, in which su...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE You don’t have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness �...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE We're kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we're uneasy about the fac...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. per...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE