David Foster Quotes
I felt the sort of soaring, ceilingless tedium that transcends tedium and becomes worry.
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.
The reason ... our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down.
I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it.
I am concentrating docilely on the question why U.S. restrooms always appear to us as infirmaries for public distress, the place to reagain control.
Pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. per se.
Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved.
It was when I was the age where you can, as they say, "hear voices" without worrying that something is wrong with you. I "heard voices" all the time as a small child.
I had, by thirteen, developed a sort of Taoist hubris about my ability to control via non-control.
Like so many other nerdy, disaffected young people of that time, I dreamed of becoming an 'artist', i.e., somebody whose adult job was original and creative instead of tedious and dronelike.
There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration.
The desire for perfect release and the real-world impossibility of perfect, whenever-you-want-it release had together produced a tension they could no longer stand.
I believe I want adult sanity, which seems to me the only unalloyed form of heroism available today.
But there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying.
Does somebody have an explanation why there's human flesh on the hall window upstairs?
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.
Why not? Why not?Why not not, then, if the best reasoning you can contrive is why not?
We're not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader's own life "outside" the story changes the story.
Ideally, each piece of art's its own unique object, and its evaluation's always present-tense.
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.
I know I never work in whatever gets called an office, e.g., a school office I use only for meeting students and storing books I know I'm not going to read anytime soon.
I perhaps could have been somewhat better. One of the interesting things about playing competitive sports as a child is that you confront your own limitations rather starkly at a certain point.
I tend to think of fiction as being mainly about characters and human beings and inner experience, whereas essays can be much more expository and didactic and more about subjects or ideas.
Not having a passport makes me very blasé about what appears in foreign periodicals since I know I'll never see it.
There's a weird kind of paradox that the more expensive the vacation is, the more potentially anxiety-producing it is.
My personal belief is that because technology and economic logic has gotten so sophisticated, cruelties can be perpetrated now that would have been unimaginable two or three hundred years ago.
David Foster Wallace: Because I'd like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time instead of having to go back in my head and enjoy them then.
This is why they started us here so young: to give ourselves away before the age when the questions 'why' and 'to what' grow real beaks and claws.
We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately (...) To games or needles, to some other person.
Think of the old cliché about the mind being 'an excellent servant but a terrible master'. This, like many clichés, so lame & banal on the surface, actually expresses a great & terrible truth.
Words and a book and a belief that the world is words...
What I know about auto racing could be inscribed with a dry Magic Marker on the lip of a Coke bottle.
How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?
Tell them there are no holes for your fingers in the masks ofmen. Tell them how could you ever even hope to love what you can'tgrab onto.
There’s been time this whole time. You can’t kill time with your heart. Everything takes time.
I guess a bit part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves.
For reasons that are not well understood, war's codes are safer for most of us than love's.
There is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.
Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human i
You decide. You be the judge. It says You are welcome regardless of severity. Severity is in the eye of the sufferer, it says. Pain is pain.
Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies.
