The basic idea that the purpose of life is to be happy or is to experience the most favorable ratio of pleasure to suffering or productivity to work or gratification to sacrifice or any of that stuff, which, you know, a couple generations ago, to say that kind of stuff would have made you, you know, a freak - a freak and an Epicurean - and now seems to be so much - simply an unquestioned assumption of the culture that we don't really even talk about it anymore.
David Foster WallaceHe knew what the Beats know and what the great tennis player knows, son: learn to do nothing, with your whole head and body, and everything will be done by what's around you.
David Foster WallaceThere's good self-consciousness, and then there's toxic, paralyzing, raped-by-psychic-Bedouins self-consciousness.
David Foster WallaceThat as people age, accumulate more and more private experiences, their sense of history tightens, narrows, becomes more personal? So that to the extent that they remember events of social importance, they remember only for example 'where they were' when such-and-such occurred. Et cetera et cetera. Objective events and data become naturally more and more subjectively colored.
David Foster WallaceYou are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice.
David Foster WallaceProgressive liberals seem incapable of stating the obvious truth: that we who are well off should be willing to share more of what we have with poor people not for the poor people's sake but for our own; i.e., we should share what we have in order to become less narrow and frightened and lonely and self-centered people.
David Foster Wallace