And I was -- this is just how I was afraid you'd take it. I knew it, that you'd think this means you were right to be afraid all the time and never feel secure or trust me. I knew it'd be "See, you're leaving after all when you promised you wouldn't." I knew it but I'm trying to explain anyway, okay? And I know you probably won't understand this either, but --wait-- just try to listen and maybe absorb this, okay? Ready? Me leaving is not the confirmation of all your fears about me. It is not. It's because of them.
David Foster WallaceKeep in mind that a language is both a map of the world and its own world, with its own shadowlands and crevasses - places where statements that seem to obey all the language's rules are nevertheless impossible to deal with.
David Foster WallaceTo make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.
David Foster WallaceThink of the old clichรฉ about โthe mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.โ This, like many clichรฉs, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head.
David Foster WallaceBut if I decide to decide thereโs a different, less selfish, less lonely point to my life, wonโt the reason for this decision be my desire to be less lonely, meaning to suffer less overall pain? Can the decision to be less selfish ever be anything other than a selfish decision?
David Foster WallaceWhat TV is extremely good at - and realize that this is 'all it does' - is discerning what large numbers of people think they want, and supplying it.
David Foster WallaceAnd make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit "I donโt really mean what Iโm saying." So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That itโs impossible to mean what you say? That maybe itโs too bad itโs impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, todayโs irony ends up saying: "How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.
David Foster Wallace