Fiction, poetry, music...these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated. David Foster Wallace More Quotes by David Foster Wallace More Quotes From David Foster Wallace Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties - all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion - these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated. David Foster Wallace party loneliness sex To be, in a word, unborable.... It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish David Foster Wallace boredom modern-life keys God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I’m not crazy about. David Foster Wallace laid-back style crazy ....there is an ending [to Infinite Jest] as far as I'm concerned. Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an "end" can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame. If no such convergence or projection occured to you, then the book's failed for you. David Foster Wallace lines book way I submit that tennis is the most beautiful sport there is and also the most demanding. It requires body control, hand-eye coordination, quickness, flat-out speed, endurance, and that weird mix of caution and abandon we call courage. It also requires smarts. Just one single shot in one exchange in one point of a high-level match is a nightmare of mechanical variables. David Foster Wallace smart beautiful sports ...loneliness is not a function of solitude. David Foster Wallace function solitude loneliness I will probably write an hour a day and spend eight hours a day biting my knuckle and worrying about not writing. David Foster Wallace eight worry writing Think of the old cliché about ‘the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.’ This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. David Foster Wallace suicide mind thinking There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship - be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles - is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. David Foster Wallace ethical-principles spiritual mother I was always either so unreasonably and pointlessly happy that no one place could seem to contain me, or so melancholy, so sick and silly with sadness that there was no place I could stomach the thought of entering. I hated it here. And I have never been as happy as when I was here. And these two things together confront me with the beak and claws of the True. David Foster Wallace sadness silly two Do not underestimate objects. David Foster Wallace objects underestimate The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘Oh how banal.’ David Foster Wallace risk eye artist Certain sincerely devout and spiritually advanced people believe that the God of their understanding helps them find parking places and gives them advice on Mass. Lottery numbers. David Foster Wallace numbers believe people To be a mass tourist, for me,...is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing. David Foster Wallace tourists dimensions lines We will, of course, without hesitation use art to parody, ridicule, debunk, or criticize ideologies. David Foster Wallace use writing art Perhaps this is what it means to go mad: to be emptied and to be aware of the emptiness. David Foster Wallace emptiness mad mean I miss everyone. I can remember being young and feeling a thing and identifying it as homesickness, and then thinking well now that’s odd, isn’t it, because I was home, all the time. What on earth are we to make of that? David Foster Wallace missing home thinking life's endless war against the self you cannot live without. David Foster Wallace endless-war self war Writing fiction takes me out of time. I sit down and the clock will not exist for me for a few hours. That’s probably as close to immortal as we’ll ever get. David Foster Wallace down-and writing fiction To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people. David Foster Wallace icons communication people
