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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.

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
Like
Democratic
Citizens
Tree
Inspirational
Doesn
Nature
Leafs
Part
Leaf
Believe
Citizen

More quotes by David Foster Wallace

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I had, by thirteen, developed a sort of Taoist hubris about my ability to control via non-control.
David Foster Wallace
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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?
David Foster Wallace
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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.
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Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude - but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense.
David Foster Wallace
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Almost anything that you pay close, direct attention to becomes interesting.
David Foster Wallace
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Te Occidere Possunt Sed Te Edere Non Possunt Nefas Est (They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier).
David Foster Wallace
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The integrity of my sleep has been forever compromised, sir.
David Foster Wallace
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Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.
David Foster Wallace
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The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.
David Foster Wallace
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Fiction, poetry, music...these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.
David Foster Wallace
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My worst character flaw that I'm conscious of is that I tend to think my way into circles instead of resolving anything. It's paralyzing and boring for people around me.
David Foster Wallace
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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.
David Foster Wallace
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People, unless they're paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority.
David Foster Wallace
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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.
David Foster Wallace
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I find in myself a need to get very away.
David Foster Wallace
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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?
David Foster Wallace
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If Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it.
David Foster Wallace
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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
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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
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It's like a fugue of evaded responsibility.
David Foster Wallace