Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.


David Foster Wallace

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Ortho Stice played with a kind of rigid, liquid grace, like a panther in a back-brace.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
He said he didn’t think Lenore should go to the G.O.D.
"Nobody ever finds anybody in a place ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
Every two or three generations the world gets vastly different, and the context in which you have to...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
It's no accident that in a bureaucracy getting fired is called 'termination,' as in ontological eras...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
Trite though it (used to) sound, real sexuality is about our struggles to connect with one another, ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
This is the kind of paradox, I think, of what it is to be a halfway intelligent American right now, ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
I am about art here, not simple reproduction.
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TV's 'real' agenda is to be 'liked,' because if you like what you're seeing,...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
And I was -- this is just how I was afraid you'd take it. I knew it, that you'd think this means you...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
Almost anyone who loves tennis and follows the men’s tour on television has, over the last few yea...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
Life is like tennis. Those who serve best usually win.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
The real, many-veiled answer to the question of just what goes through a great player's mind as he s...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
LaMont, the truth is that the world is incredibly, incredibly, unbelievably old. You suffer with the...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
Nel tennis il vero avversario, la frontiera che include, è il giocatore stesso. C'è sempre e solo ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
My chest bumps like a dryer with shoes in it.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
This wise old whiskery fish swims up to three young fish and goes, 'Morning, boys, how's the water?'...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
You want to know the story? I'd be happy to tell you. I think I have just enough caloric energy stor...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
Huh. Well you and I just disagree. Maybe the world just feels differently to us. This is all going b...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
Trying to be anti-cool is just one exponent off trying to be cool -- it's the same beast.
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Then he looked up, despite all best prior intentions. In four minutes, it would be another hour; a h...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
...you are excused from doing the work of constructing the fantasy. The ads do it for you. The ads, ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picay...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
Advertising that makes fun of itself is so powerful because it
implicitly congratulates both it...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
This appetite to choose death by pleasure if it is available to choose - this appetite of your peopl...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
Lenore, it's simply that I love you. You know that. Every fiber of your being is loved by every fibe...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
Supongo que ser tímido significa básicamente estar absorbido por uno mismo hasta el punto de que s...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
If you can think of times in your life that you've treated people with extraordinary decency and lov...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
Eyes the broad-shouldered faceless character that symbolizes Men’s Room, does Sternberg, and strug...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
When something large and oncoming passed, the windshield's big rectangle was for a moment incandesce...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
I am fortunately an entirely handsome devil and appear even younger than twenty-nine. I look like a ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
But and so things are slow, and like you they have this irritating suspicion that any real satisfact...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
Sometimes, when I don't think about it, I think I have just totally escaped the Bad Thing, and that ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
If I’m hanging out with you, I can’t even tell whether I like you or not because I’m too worri...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
I'm not saying that television is vulgar and dumb because the people who compose the Audience are vu...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
JAY: No really. Be secure. Pretend I'm a sperm cell. Here. I take the string out of the... hood of m...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
The reasons that center on others are easy to manipulate. All hollow things are light.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms nearly always shoo...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
Te occidere possunt sed te edere possunt nefas est.
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Il suicidio è così contrario a tanti nostri istinti e impulsi programmati che nessuno sano di ment...
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Blue Springs Memorial Hospital Palliative Care Unit, Independence, Mo.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
The truth is you've already heard this. That this is what it's like. That it's what makes room for t...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
It is a fact of life that certain people are corrosive to others’ self esteem simply as a function...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
She smelled of talcum powder and Big Red.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
It's not that words or human language stop having any meaning or relevance after you die, by the way...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
...this was depressing, much the way discovering that somebody is easy to manipulate is always a lit...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
The fraud part of me was always there, just as a puzzle piece, objectively speaking, is a true piece...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
I don't think he was used to patients who were already aware of what their real problem was. He was ...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
The almost-35-year-old Terry Schmidt had very nearly nothing left anymore of the delusion that he di...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
-when he thinks of the starry-eyed puerility and narcissism of these fantasies now, a rough decade l...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
*One clue that there’s something not quite real about sequential time the way you experience it i...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
Atwater knew — as did everyone at Style, though by some strange unspoken consensus it was never sa...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
The reality is that dying isn’t bad, but it takes forever. And that forever is no time at all. I k...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
(..)-Dr. G. would later say that the whole "my whole life flashed before me" phenomenon at the end i...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
Even as I wrote my note to Fern, for instance, expressing sentiments and regrets that were real, a p...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
If I understand you right,' he says, 'you're saying that you're basically a calculating manipulative...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
It is a fact of life that certain people are corrosive to others' self esteem simply as a function o...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
What teachers and the administration in that era never seemed to see was that the mental work of wha...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
The truth is you already know what it's like. You already know the difference between the size and s...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
Hell hath no fury like a coolly received postmodernist.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
You know, the whole thing about perfectionism. The perfectionism is very dangerous. Because of cours...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
When he smoked marijuana he tended to masterbate a great deal.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
I like the fans’ sound at night. Do you? It’s like somebody big far away goes like: it’sOKit�...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
Here is how to turn down an extramural date so you won't be asked again. Say something like I'm terr...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfi...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
This, of course, is because today’s postfeminist era is also today’s postmodern era, in which su...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
You don’t have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness �...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
We're kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we're uneasy about the fac...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
Pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. per...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still 'are' human beings, now. Or can be.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE