904 Quotes by David Foster Wallace

Lucien finally dies, rather a while after he’s quit shuddering like a clubbed muskie and seemed to them to die, as he finally sheds his body’s suit, Lucien finds his gut and throat again and newly whole, clean and unimpeded, and is free, catapulted over fans and the Convexity’s glass palisades at desperate speeds, soaring north, sounding a bell-clear and nearly maternal alarmed call-to-arms in all the world’s well-known tongues.

And then also, again, still, what are those boundaries, if they’re not baselines, that contain and direct its infinite expansion inward, that make tennis like chess on the run, beautiful and infinitely dense? Schtitt’s.

He didn’t reject the idea so much as not react to it and watch as it floated away.

That what appears to be egoism so often isn’t.

None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death.

Hear this or not, as you will. Learn it now, or later – the world has time. Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui – these are the true hero’s enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real.

The individual’s right to pursue his own vision of the best ration of pleasure to pain: utterly sacrosanct.

That evil people never believe they are evil, but rather that everyone else is evil.

Life is essentially one long search for an ashtray.