Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
No single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.
David Foster Wallace
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
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
Moment
Individual
Inspirational
Moments
Unendurable
Jest
Single
Powerful
More quotes by David Foster Wallace
It’s a very American illness, the idea of giving yourself away entirely to the idea of working in order to achieve some sort of brass ring that usually involves people feeling some way about you – I mean, people wonder why we walk around feeling alienated and lonely and stressed out.
David Foster Wallace
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.
David Foster Wallace
I have filled 3 Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me.
David Foster Wallace
She wanted only tall smooth bottles whose labels spoke of Proof.
David Foster Wallace
I'd like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time, instead of having to go back in my head and enjoy them.
David Foster Wallace
To be a mass tourist, for me,...is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.
David Foster Wallace
...the sun would leave my sky if I couldn't assume you'd simply come and tell me you were sad.
David Foster Wallace
We all suffer alone in the real world. True empathy's impossible. But if a piece of fiction can alow us imaginatively to identify with a character's pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with their own. This is nourishing, redemptive we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple.
David Foster Wallace
Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.
David Foster Wallace
What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves. They've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.
David Foster Wallace
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.
David Foster Wallace
...morning is the soul's night.
David Foster Wallace
Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere Mary went, the lights became erratic.
David Foster Wallace
The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.
David Foster Wallace
Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.
David Foster Wallace
Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.
David Foster Wallace
We are not dead but asleep, dreaming of ourselves.
David Foster Wallace
Almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it.
David Foster Wallace
Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.
David Foster Wallace
Some words have to be explicitly uttered, Lenore. Only by actually uttering certain words does one really DO what one SAYS. 'Love' is one of those words, performative words. Some words can literally make things real.
David Foster Wallace
