904 Quotes by David Foster Wallace

The German logician Kant was right in this respect, human beings are all pretty much identical in terms of our hardwiring. Although we are seldom conscious of it, we are all basically just instruments or expressions of our evolkutiuonary drives, which are themselves the expressions of forces that are infinitely larger and more important than we are.

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

Sounds kind of ad hoc and jerry-rigged and haphazard.’ ‘Everybody’s a critic. This wasn’t an aesthetic endeavor.

Don’t worry about getting in touch with your feelings, they’ll get in touch with you.

I’ve already just completely opened up about my shame and my inability to be open and straightforward about this. You’re exposing something I’ve already held up to view. It’s your shame about being ashamed of what you’re afraid might be seen as a lack of brightness that’s getting to stay buried under this dead horse of my deformity that you’re trying to whip.

My ambitions at this point are modest and mostly surround staying alive.

Good literature makes your head throb heartlike.

An ad that pretends to be art is – at absolute best – like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This.

Like the doctrine of determinism, its better-known metaphysical cousin, fatalism holds that it is not in our power to do anything other than what we actually end up doing.