904 Quotes by David Foster Wallace

When something large and oncoming passed, the windshield’s big rectangle was for a moment incandesced and opaque with water, which the wipers heaved mightily to displace.

When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces. The man who’d introduced them didn’t much like either of them, though he acted as if he did, anxious as he was to preserve good relations at all times. One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one.

I Philo, educating yourself was something you had to do in spite if school, not because of it – which is basically why so many of my high school peers are still there in Philo even now, selling one another insurance, drinking supermarket liquor, watching television, awaiting the formality of their first cardiac.

Ideally, each piece of art’s its own unique object, and its evaluation’s always present-tense.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

He and Hal exchanged the very slight sorts of nods people use when they like each other past all need for politeness.

What if, when Tracy Austin writes that after her 1989 car crash, ‘I quickly accepted that there was nothing I could do about it,’ the statement is not only true but exhaustively descriptive of the entire acceptance process she went through?

There are secrets within secrets, though – always.

That there might not be angels, but there are people who might as well be angels.