S.L. Wallace Quotes

Words and a book and a belief that the world is words.

My bones are ringing the way sometimes people say their ears are ringing, I'm so tired.

Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T true is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it.

Do this: hate him for me after I die. I beg you. Dying request.

He knew what the Beats know and what the great tennis player knows, son: learn to do nothing, with your whole head and body, and everything will be done by what's around you.

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

‎Who would die for this chance to be fed this death of pleasure with spoons, in their warm homes, alone, unmoving?

....basically the sort of guy who looks entirely at home in sockless white loafers and a mint-green knit shirt from Lacoste.

If you've never wept and want to, have a child.

The first time I lay actual eyes on the real David Lynch on the set of his movie, he's peeing on a tree...Mr. David Lynch, a prodigious coffee drinker, apparently pees hard and often.

Do not underestimate objects.

We will, of course, without hesitation use art to parody, ridicule, debunk, or criticize ideologies.

So yo then man what's your story?

It's probably hard to feel any sort of Romantic spiritual connection to nature when you have to make your living from it.

This is nourishing, redemptive we become less alone inside.

I have filled 3 Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me.

There's good self-consciousness, and then there's toxic, paralyzing, raped-by-psychic-Bedouins self-consciousness.

I find in myself a need to get very away.

You have decided being scared is caused mostly by thinking.

TV's "real" agenda is to be "liked," because if you like what you're seeing, you'll stay tuned. TV is completely unabashed about this; it's its sole raison.

God, what a ghastly enterprise to be in, though-and what an odd way to achieve success. I'm an exhibitionist who wants to hide, but is unsuccessful at hiding; therefore, somehow I succeed.

Dostoevski informs everybody; or he ought to.

He suddenly felt nothing, or rather Nothing, a pre-tornadic stillness of zero sensation, as if he were the very space he occupied.

Entertainment provides relief. Art provokes engagement.

She had a brainy girls discomfort about her own beauty and its effects on folks.

If Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it.

She wanted only tall smooth bottles whose labels spoke of Proof.

That it is statistically easier for low-IQ people to kick an addiction than it is for high-IQ people...That boring activities become, perversely, much less boring if you concentrate intently on them.

You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice.

Say the whole point of love is to try to get your fingers through the holes in the lover's mask. To get some kind of hold on the mask, and who cares how you do it.

She took a sort of abject pride in her mecilessness toward herself.

And when he came to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out.

Please learn the pragmatics of expressing fear: sometimes words that seem to express really invoke. This can be tricky.

sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them.

Dieting makes me want to murder everyone around me.

One paradox of professional writing is that books written solely for money and/or acclaim will almost never be good enough to garner either.

American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.

You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

I knew my limitations and the limitations of the courts I played on, and adjusted thusly. I was at my best in bad conditions.

I like the fans’ sound at night. Do you? It’s like somebody big far away goes like: it’sOKit’sOKit’sOKit’sOK, over and over. From very far away.

The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still "are" human beings, now. Or can be.

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

So which is the lie? Hard or soft? Silence or time?

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.