Naturally, the significant results that legitimize a mathematical theory take time to derive, and then even more time to be fully accepted, and of course throughout this time the Insanity-v.-Genius question remains undecided, probably even for the mathematician himself, so that he’s developing his theory and cooking his proofs under conditions of enormous personal stress and doubt, and sometimes isn’t even vindicated in his own lifetime, etc.

— David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace Quotes

Personal pleasure and gross revenue looked at last to lie along the same demand curve, at least as far as home entertainment went.

— David Foster Wallace

The reality is that dying isn’t bad, but it takes forever.

— David Foster Wallace

351. As in a combination of the First and Twelfth Steps, goes the AA joke: ‘My Life is Unmanageable and I’d Like to Share it With You.

— David Foster Wallace

How much must a person want out, to put his head in a microwave oven? A dim woman all the kids had known of in Boaz had put her cat in a microwave to dry it after a tick-bath and set the oven just on Defrost and the cat ended up all over the woman’s kitchen’s walls. How would you rig the thing so it would activate with the door open? Is there just some sort of refrigerator-light button you could hold down and secure with tape? Would the tape melt?

— David Foster Wallace

But facing a dragon does not mean swaggering up to it unarmed and insulting its mom.

— David Foster Wallace

Thomas Carlisle.

— David Foster Wallace

I know bashing, Pat, and this was unabashed bashing at its most fascist.

— David Foster Wallace

Here is how to avoid thinking about any of this by practicing and playing until everything runs on autopilot and talent’s unconscious exercise becomes a way to escape yourself, a long waking dream of pure play. The irony is that this makes you very good, and you start to become regarded as having a prodigious talent to live up to.

— David Foster Wallace

As, if you will give the permission, does this love you speak of, M. Tine’s grand love. It means only the attachment. Tine is attached, fanatically. Our attachments are our temple, what we worship, no? What we give ourselves to, what we invest with faith.

— David Foster Wallace

Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care.

— David Foster Wallace

It strikes me that EXIT signs would look to a native speaker of Latin like red-lit signs that say HE LEAVES.

— David Foster Wallace

I believe the influence of Kierkegaard on Camus is underestimated. I believe Dennis Gabor may very well have been the Antichrist. I believe Hobbes is just Rousseau in a dark mirror. I believe, with Hegel, that transcendence is absorption.

— David Foster Wallace

It’s a pivotal, it’s a seminal, religious day when you get to both hear and feel your destiny at the same moment.

— David Foster Wallace

Hal likes to get high in secret, but a bigger secret is that he’s as attached to the secrecy as he is to getting high.” “filmic mind” “Everybody was tired in a good way.” “someone sometime let you forget how to choose, and what.” “novocaine of the soul” “The original sense of addiction involved being bound over, dedicated” “The addict.

— David Foster Wallace

And the dope often gave him a painful case of pleurisy if he smoked it for more than two straight days of heavy continuous smoking.

— David Foster Wallace

For irony – exploiting gaps between what’s said and what’s meant, between how things try to appear and how they really are – is the time-honored way artists seek to illuminate and explode hypocrisy.

— David Foster Wallace

But if we can’t think ourselves,... that means we, ourselves, are things that can’t think themselves, and so are the proper objects for our thought; we fulfill the game’s condition, we are ourselves Other. So if we can think ourselves, we can’t; and if we can’t; we can. KABLAM,... There go the old crania.

— David Foster Wallace

Golf. A golf man. Is my tone communicating the contempt? Billiards on a big table, Jim. A bodiless game of spasmodic flailing and flying sod. A quote unquote sport. Anal rage and checkered berets.

— David Foster Wallace

Adjust. Adjust? Stay the same. No? Is not stay the same? It is cold? It is wind? Cold and wind is the world. Outside, yes? On the tennis court the you is the player: this is not where there is cold wind. I am saying. Different world inside. World built inside cold outside world of wind breaks the wind, shelters the player, you, if you stay the same, stay inside.

— David Foster Wallace

No, she simply felt – at times, mind you, not all the time, but at sharp and distinctive intuitive moments – as if she had no real existence, except for what she said and did and perceived and et cetera, and that these were, it seemed at such times, not really under her control. There was nothing pure.

— David Foster Wallace
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