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 More Quotes by David Foster Wallace More Quotes From David Foster Wallace He suddenly felt nothing, or rather Nothing, a pre-tornadic stillness of zero sensation, as if he were the very space he occupied. David Foster Wallace emptiness zero space My whole life I've been a fraud. I'm not exaggerating. Pretty much all I've ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me in other people. Mostly to be liked or admired. It's a little more complicated than that, maybe. But when you come right down to it it's to be liked, loved. Admired, approved of, applauded, whatever. You get the idea. David Foster Wallace trying people ideas Hideous psychic fallout they'd all endured both in active marijuana-dependency and then in marijuana-detox: the social isolation, anxious lassitude, and the hyperself-consciousness that then reinforced the withdrawal and anxiety - the increasing emotional abstraction, poverty of affect, and then total emotional catalepsy - the obsessive analyzing, finally the paralytic stasis that results from obsessive analysis of all possible implications of both getting up from the couch and not getting up from the couch. David Foster Wallace marijuana psychics emotional ...we live in an era of terrible preoccupation with presentation and interpretation, one in which relations between who someone is and what he believes and how he "expresses himself" have been thrown into big time flux. David Foster Wallace preoccupation eras believe I believe I want adult sanity, which seems to me the only unalloyed form of heroism available today. David Foster Wallace heroism adults believe I'm screaming for help and everybody's acting as if I'm singing Ethel Merman covers. David Foster Wallace singing acting helping The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates. David Foster Wallace irony splits hypocrisy Progressive liberals seem incapable of stating the obvious truth: that we who are well off should be willing to share more of what we have with poor people not for the poor people's sake but for our own; i.e., we should share what we have in order to become less narrow and frightened and lonely and self-centered people. David Foster Wallace lonely self order In reality, genuine epiphanies are extremely rare. In contemporary adult life maturation & acquiescence to reality are gradual processes. Modern usage usually deploys epiphany as a metaphor. It is usually only in dramatic representations, religious iconography, and the 'magical thinking' of children that insight is compressed to a sudden blinding flash. David Foster Wallace religious children reality That what appears to be egoism so often isn't. David Foster Wallace egoism 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. David Foster Wallace addiction boring people My bones are ringing the way sometimes people say their ears are ringing, I'm so tired. David Foster Wallace tired ears people sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them. David Foster Wallace sarcasm bottles care 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. David Foster Wallace secret giving people He didn't reject the idea so much as not react to it and watch as it floated away. He thought very broadly of desires and ideas being watched but not acted upon, he thought of impulses being starved of expression and dying out and floating dryly away. David Foster Wallace dying expression ideas It's like a fugue of evaded responsibility. David Foster Wallace fugue responsibility ...and suddenly it occurred to him that the birds, whose twitters and repeated songs sounded so pretty and affirming of nature and the coming day, might actually, in a code known only to other birds, be the birds each saying 'Get away' or 'This branch is mine!' or 'This tree is mine! I'll kill you! Kill, kill!' Or any other manner of dark, brutal, or self-protective stuff—they might be listening to war cries. The thought came from nowhere and made his spirits dip for some reason. David Foster Wallace dark song war The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. 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 keys sides 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. David Foster Wallace fans sound night 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. David Foster Wallace mask holes men
