904 Quotes by David Foster Wallace

People, unless they're paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority.

Progressive liberals seem incapable of stating the obvious truth: that we who are well off should be willing to share more of what we have with poor people not for the poor people's sake but for our own; i.e., we should share what we have in order to become less narrow and frightened and lonely and self-centered people.

The severing of an established connection is exponentially more painful than the rejection of an attempted connection.

I wish you way more than luck.

The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home.

Capital T-truth is about life before death.

Almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it.

The fact that the most powerful and significant connections in our lives are (at the time) invisible to us seems to me a compelling argument for religious reverence rather than skeptical empiricism as a response to life's meaning.

I felt the sort of soaring, ceilingless tedium that transcends tedium and becomes worry.