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?”

“My chest bumps like a dryer with shoes in it.”

“Severity is in the eye of the sufferer, it says. Pain is pain.”

“After a few weeks of this she'd spend a whole day weeping, beating at herself as if on fire.”

“Betraying her class and origin with the heartbreaking openness Joelle's always viewed as either terribly stupid or terribly brave”

“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”

“'You know what your problem is, Hallie?' 'I have just one problem?'”

“Then Thursday Coyle had his left wrist tied to his right ankle and was still beating this new kid Stockhausen until Schtitt sent Tex Watson down to tell him to knock it off.”

“They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier.”

“These worst mornings with cold floors and hot windows and merciless light—the soul’s certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer.”

“Nor let us forget Vegas's synecdoche and beating heart. It's kitty-corner from Bally's: Caesar's Palace. The granddaddy. As big as 20 walmarts end to end. Real marble and fake marble, carpeting you can pass out on without contusion, 130,000 square feet of casion alone. Domed ceilings, clerestories, barrel vaults. In Caesars Palace is America conceived as a new kind of Rome: conqueror of its own people. An empire of self.”

“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.”

“I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I'm starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life's sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. But since it's my own choices that'll lock me in, it seems unavoidable--if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them.”

“This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside.”

“When a solipsist dies ... everything goes with him.”

“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.”

“Worship your body, beauty, and sexual allure and you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.”

“Time wasn't passing so much as kneeling beside him in a torn tee-shirt disclosing the rodent-nosed tits of a man who disdains the care of his once-comely bod.”

“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.”

“I'm so scared of dying without ever being really seen. Can you understand?”

“What if the preacher or father’s saying ‘Someone here’s lost and hopeless’ was tantamount to those Sun-Times horoscopes that are specially designed to be so universally obvious that they always give their horoscope readers that special eerie feeling of particularity and insight, exploiting the psychological fact that most people are narcissistic and prone to the illusion that they and their problems are uniquely special and that if they’re feeling a certain way then surely they’re the only person who is feeling like that.”

“Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.”

“I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture — a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It’s maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it’s not these things, quite. It’s more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I’m small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It’s wanting to jump overboard.”

“There’s been time this whole time. You can’t kill time with your heart. Everything takes time.”

“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”