Quote

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

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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
Young
Odd
Home
Miss
Wells
Missing
Well
Feeling
Thing
Everyone
Make
Feelings
Time
Remember
Homesickness
Thinking
Earth
Identifying

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I have always tried to avoid talking to pretty girls, because pretty girls have a vicious effect on me in which every part of my brain is shut down except for the part that says unbelievably stupid things and the part that is aware that I am saying unbelievably stupid things.
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The point here is ... to be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.
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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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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.
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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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It's probably hard to feel any sort of Romantic spiritual connection to nature when you have to make your living from it.
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In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.
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The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the wall, during the first eight pages.
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Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have much harder, more tedious or painful lives than I do, overall.
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life's endless war against the self you cannot live without.
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There's a weird kind of paradox that the more expensive the vacation is, the more potentially anxiety-producing it is.
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I believe I want adult sanity, which seems to me the only unalloyed form of heroism available today.
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Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.
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It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.
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It's like a fugue of evaded responsibility.
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We're not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader's own life outside the story changes the story.
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She had a brainy girls discomfort about her own beauty and its effects on folks.
David Foster Wallace