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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

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David Foster Wallace
Age: 45 †
Born: 1962
Born: February 21
Died: 2008
Died: February 12
Author
Essayist
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Ithica
New York
David Wallace
Irony
Apart
Gets
Hypocrisies
Great
Duplicates
Thing
Duplicate
Things
Splits
Hypocrisy
Flaws

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Fiction, poetry, music...these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.
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There is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness.
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Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move.
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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.
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Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes.
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We're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we've never even met?
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I don't think writers are any smarter than other people. I think they may be more compelling in their stupidity, or in their confusion.
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Good writing isn’t a science. It’s an art, and the horizon is infinite. You can always get better.
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I never, even for a moment, doubted what they’d told me. This is why it is that adults and even parents can, unwittingly, be cruel: they cannot imagine doubt’s complete absence. They have forgotten.
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In fact, the likeliest reason why so many of us care so little about politics is that modern politicians makes us sad, hurt us deep down in ways that are hard even to name, much less talk about.
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For me, boviscopophobia is an even stronger motive than semi-agoraphobia for staying on the ship when we're in port.
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All I'm saying is that it's shortsighted to blame TV. It's simply another symptom. TV didn't invent our aesthetic childishness here any more than the Manhattan Project invented aggression.
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Most of us will still take nihilism over neanderthalism.
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To experience commitment as the loss of options, a type of death, the death of childhood's limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress-this will happen, mark me. Childhood's end.
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life's endless war against the self you cannot live without.
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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.
David Foster Wallace
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There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration.
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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?
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The way I think about things and experience things is not particularly linear, and it's not orderly, and it's not pyramidical, and there are a lot of loops.
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The individual's right to pursue his own vision of the best ration of pleasure to pain: utterly sacrosanct.
David Foster Wallace