Such techniques, including meta-discursive stuff, self-reference, irony, black humor, cynicism, grotesquerie and shock, it would be safe to say that television or televisual values rule the culture. Television is successfully using a lot of those same techniques but using them for a very different agenda, which is to sort of create an ethos and please people and to sell products to consumers.
David Foster WallaceTrue heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and careโwith no one there to see or cheer. This is the world.
David Foster WallaceItโs a very American illness, the idea of giving yourself away entirely to the idea of working in order to achieve some sort of brass ring that usually involves people feeling some way about you โ I mean, people wonder why we walk around feeling alienated and lonely and stressed out.
David Foster WallaceI am concentrating docilely on the question why U.S. restrooms always appear to us as infirmaries for public distress, the place to reagain control.
David Foster WallaceThe sound of wind had become, for me, silence. When it went away, I was left with the squeak of the blood in my head and the aural glitter of all those little eardrum hairs quivering like a drunk in withdrawal.
David Foster Wallace