904 Quotes by David Foster Wallace

Every whole person has ambitions, objectives, initiatives, goals. This one particular boy’s goal was to be able to press his lips to every square inch of his own body. His arms to the shoulders and most of the legs beneath the knee were child’s play. After these areas of his body, however, the difficulty increased with the abruptness of a coastal shelf. The boy came to understand that unimaginable challenges lay ahead of him. He was six.

The executive intern responded: ‘Do we all really value a painting more than a photograph anymore?

To experience commitment as the loss of options, a type of death, the death of childhood’s limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress-this will happen, mark me. Childhood’s end.

Am I happy? is one of those questions that, if it has got to be asked, more or less dictates its own answer.

With words and tears she has amputated something form me. I gave her the intimate importance of me, and her bus pulled away, leaving something key of mine inside her like the weapon of a bee. All I want to do now is drive very away, to bleed.

And he wishes, in the cold quiet of his archer’s heart, that he himself could feel the intensity of their reconciliations as strongly as he feels that of their battles.

She was the kind of fatally pretty and nubile wraithlike figure who glides through the sweaty junior-high corridors of every nocturnal emitter’s dreamscape.

It would take an architect who could hate enough to feel enough to love enough to perpetrate the kind of special cruelty only real lovers can inflict.

Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?