904 Quotes by David Foster Wallace

The sound of wind had become, for me, silence. When it went away, I was left with the squeak of the blood in my head and the aural glitter of all those little eardrum hairs quivering like a drunk in withdrawal.

You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.

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.

We will, of course, without hesitation use art to parody, ridicule, debunk, or criticize ideologies.

... it takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak.

One paradox of professional writing is that books written solely for money and/or acclaim will almost never be good enough to garner either.

...and suddenly it occurred to him that the birds, whose twitters and repeated songs sounded so pretty and affirming of nature and the coming day, might actually, in a code known only to other birds, be the birds each saying 'Get away' or 'This branch is mine!' or 'This tree is mine! I'll kill you! Kill, kill!' Or any other manner of dark, brutal, or self-protective stuff—they might be listening to war cries. The thought came from nowhere and made his spirits dip for some reason.

You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.