David Foster Wallace - You Quotes

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You can be shaped, or you can be broken. There is not much in between. Try to learn. Be coachable. Try to learn from everybody, especially those who fail. This is hard.... How promising you are as a Student of the Game is a function of what you can pay attention to without running away.

David Foster Wallace
Under fun's new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don't want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers share and respond to, feel.

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

David Foster Wallace
I'd tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear

David Foster Wallace
He said she went around with her feelings out in front of her with an arm around the feelings' windpipe and a Glock 9mm. to the feelings' temple like a terrorist with a hostage, daring you to shoot.

David Foster Wallace
Everything gets horrible. Everything you see gets ugly. Lurid is the word. Doctor Garton said lurid, one time. That's the right word for it. And everything sounds harsh, spiny and harsh sounding, like every sound you hear all of a sudden has teeth. And smelling like I smell bad even after I just got out of the shower. It's like what's the point of washing if everything smells like I need another shower

David Foster Wallace
They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier.
Te Occidere Possunt Sed Te Edere Non Possunt Nefas Est

David Foster Wallace
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.

David Foster Wallace
Worship power-you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever ore power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart-you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

David Foster Wallace
You have wondered, perhaps, why all real accountants wear hats? They are today's cowboys. As will you be. Riding the American range. Riding herd on the unending torrent of financial data. The eddies, cataracts, arranged variations, fractious minutiae. You order the data, shepherd it, direct its flow, lead it where it's needed... You deal in facts, gentlemen, for which there has been a market since man first crept from the primeval slurry.

David Foster Wallace
What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love? What if the temple comes to Mohammed? What if you just love? without deciding? You just do: you see her and in that instant are lost to sober account-keeping and cannot choose but to love?

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

David Foster Wallace
You burn with hunger for food that does not exist.

David Foster Wallace
They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier.

David Foster Wallace
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.

David Foster Wallace
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
Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?" "I give." "You get someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog.

David Foster Wallace
Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever.

David Foster Wallace
Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable.

David Foster Wallace
There are no choices without personal freedom, Buckeroo. It's not us who are dead inside. These things you find so weak and contemptible in us - these are just the hazards of being free

David Foster Wallace
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
That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack. That concentrating on anything is very hard work.

David Foster Wallace
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.

David Foster Wallace
The psychological need to believe that others take you as seriously as you take yourself. There is nothing particularly wrong with it, as psychological needs go, but yet of course we should always remember that a deep need for anything from other people makes us easy pickings.

David Foster Wallace
'You know what your problem is, Hallie?' 'I have just one problem?'

David Foster Wallace
But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention...it will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars-compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things.

David Foster Wallace
If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important-if you want to operate on your default-setting-then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying.

David Foster Wallace
There is no hatred in my love for you. Only a sadness I feel all the more strongly for my inability to explain or describe it.

David Foster Wallace
Almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it.

David Foster Wallace
Why not? Why not? Why not not, then, if the best reasoning you can contrive is why not?

David Foster Wallace