904 Quotes by David Foster Wallace

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

That a person who did something for somebody’s gratitude was more like a 2-D cutout image of a person than a bona fide person.

The wraith responds vehemently that... No! No! Any conversation or interchange is better than none at all, to trust him on this, that the worst kind of gut-wrenching intergenerational interface is better than withdrawal or hiddenness on either side.

I begin to feel as though my thoughts and voice here are in some way the creative products of something outside me, not in my control, and yet that this shaping, determining influence outside me is still me. I feel a division which the outside voice posits as the labor pains of a nascent emotional conscience.

It’d be like casting a ballot for Stalin: you are voting for an end to all voting.

Look for a candidate who can do to the electorate what corporations are learning to do, so Government – or, better, Big Government, Big Brother, Intrusive Government – becomes the image against which this candidate defines himself. Though.

If you worship power, you will feel weak and afraid, needing ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay.

It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed... If a person in physical pain has a hard time attending to anything except that pain, a clinically depressed person cannot even perceive any other person or thing as independent of the universal pain that is digesting her cell by cell.

Tell them there are no holes for your fingers in the masks of men. Tell them how could you ever even hope to love what you can’t grab onto.