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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.

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
American
Routine
Happens
Adult
Commencement
Part
Parts
Speeches
Persons
Adults
Petty
Whole
Large
Talks
Life
Speech
Involves
Nobody
Frustration
Happen
Boredom

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It's in the democratic citizen's nature to be like a leaf that doesn't believe in the tree it's part of.
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There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says 'Morning, boys. How's the water?' And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes 'What the hell is water?'
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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?
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Rap's conscious response to the poverty and oppression of U.S. blacks is like some hideous parody of sixties black pride.
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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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That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we're all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine.
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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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The point of books is to combat loneliness.
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Does somebody have an explanation why there's human flesh on the hall window upstairs?
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One paradox of professional writing is that books written solely for money and/or acclaim will almost never be good enough to garner either.
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...Genuine pathological openness is about as seductive as Tourette's Syndrome.
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Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.
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The man who knows his limitations, has none.
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....there is an ending [to Infinite Jest] as far as I'm concerned. Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an end can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame. If no such convergence or projection occured to you, then the book's failed for you.
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Mediocrity is contextual.
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Almost anything that you pay close, direct attention to becomes interesting.
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I'm not afraid of new things. I'm just afraid of feeling alone even when there's somebody else there. I'm afraid of feeling bad. Maybe that's selfish, but it's the way I feel.
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life's endless war against the self you cannot live without.
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It's like a fugue of evaded responsibility.
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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.
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