“How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it's just words.”

—David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King

“Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I'm bullshitting myself, morally speaking?”

—David Foster Wallace, Consider the lobster and other essays

“How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.”

—David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”

—David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.”

—The Pale King (David Foster Wallace)

“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”

—David Foster Wallace; Infinite Jest
Play

“Everything I've ever let go of has claw marks on it.”

—David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“If your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything.”

—David Foster Wallace

“The real value of a real education … has almost nothing to do with knowledge and everything to do with simple awareness.”

—David Foster Wallace

“ The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. ”

—

David Foster Wallace - Commencement Speech at Keynon College in 2005

(read the whole thing here)

“...everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”

—David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“I do things like get in a taxi and say, 'The library, and step on it.'”

—David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Play

“The next suitable person you’re in light conversation with, you stop suddenly in the middle of the conversation and look at the person closely and say, “What’s wrong?” You say it in a concerned way. He’ll say, “What do you mean?” You say, “Something’s wrong. I can tell. What is it?” And he’ll look stunned and say, “How did you know?” He doesn’t realize something’s always wrong, with everybody. Often more than one thing. He doesn’t know everybody’s always going around all the time with something wrong and believing they’re exerting great willpower and control to keep other people, for whom they think nothing’s ever wrong, from seeing it.”

—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
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