What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.
David Foster WallaceI felt despair. The wordโs overused and banalified now, despair, but itโs a serious word, and Iโm using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture โ a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. Itโs maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But itโs not these things, quite. Itโs more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that Iโm small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. Itโs wanting to jump overboard.
David Foster WallaceWhat passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human [...] is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naรฏve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.
David Foster WallaceA novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane.
David Foster WallaceThe point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home.
David Foster Wallace