904 Quotes by David Foster Wallace

She took a sort of abject pride in her mecilessness toward herself.

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.

I cannot say what color Lenore Beadsman’s eyes are; I cannot look at them; they are the sun to me.

It took years after I’d graduated from Amherst to realize that people were actually far more complicated and interesting than books, that almost everyone else suffered the same secret fears and inadequacies as I, and that feeling alone and inferior was actually the great valent bond between us all. I wish I’d been smart enough to understand that when I was an adolescent.

If you've never wept and want to, have a child.

I'm screaming for help and everybody's acting as if I'm singing Ethel Merman covers...

I am not what you see and hear. -Hal

...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...

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