904 Quotes by David Foster Wallace

I called a cab, still in my towel. I jumped in the cab before it had even stopped at the gate. I actually said, “The nearest library with a cutting-edge professional grief- and trauma-therapy section, and step on it.

The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head.

They’re probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us here, but the fact is that religious dogmatists’ problem is exactly the same as the story’s atheist’s – arrogance, blind certainty, a closed-mindedness that’s like an imprisonment so complete that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up.

You believe you would die twice for another but in truth would die only for your alone self, its sentiment.

A real leader can somehow get us to do certain things that deep down we think are good and want to be able to do but usually can’t get ourselves to do on our own.

It’s one of those unpleasant opioid feverish half-sleep states, more a fugue-state than a sleep-state, less a floating than like being cast adrift on rough seas, tossed mightily in and out of this half-sleep where your mind’s still working and you can ask yourself whether you’re asleep even as you dream. And any dreams you do have seem ragged at the edges, gnawed on, incomplete.

If an art form is marginalized it’s because it’s not speaking to people.

He has that rare spinal appreciation for beauty in the ordinary that nature seems to bestow on those who have no native words for what they see.

He’d cure himself by excess.