904 Quotes by David Foster Wallace

Be on guard. The road widens, and many of the detours are seductive.

...we live in an era of terrible preoccupation with presentation and interpretation, one in which relations between who someone is and what he believes and how he "expresses himself" have been thrown into big time flux.

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.

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.

That concentrating intently on anything is very hard work.

JAY: No really. Be secure. Pretend I'm a sperm cell. Here. I take the string out of the... hood of my sweatshirt, affix it to my behind for a tail, like so...LENORE: What in God's name are you doing?JAY: Pretend, Lenore. Be an ovum. Be strong. Let me hypothetically batter at you. Batter batter. Surrender to the unreal of the real interior.LENORE: Are you supposed to be a sperm, wriggling your sweatshirt-string like that?JAY: I can feel the strength of your membrane, Lenore.

Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever.

What’s interesting to Hal Incandenza about his take on Struck, sometimes Pemulis, Evan Ingersoll, et al. is that congenital plagiarists put so much more work into camouflaging their plagiarism than it would take just to write up an assignment from conceptual scratch. It usually seems like plagiarists aren't lazy so much as kind of navigationally insecure. They have trouble navigating without a detailed map's assurance that somebody has been this way before them.

You decide. You be the judge. It says You are welcome regardless of severity. Severity is in the eye of the sufferer, it says. Pain is pain.