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"When people call it that I always get pissed off because I always think depression sounds like you just get like really sad, you get quiet and melancholy and just like sit quietly by the window sighing or just lying around. A state of not caring about anything. A kind of blue kind of peaceful state."
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"We love being mentally strong, but we hate situations that allow us to put our mental strength to good use."

"Many so-called disorders of the mind are simply disorders of thought."

"Sometimes, people trying to commit suicide manage it in a manner that leaves them breathless with astonishment."

"It is horrible being all alone."

"The ability to "fantasize" is the ability to survive. It's wonderful to speak about this subject because there have been so many wrong-headed people dealing with it.... The so-called realists are trying to drive us insane, and I refuse to be driven insane.... We survive by fantasizing. Take that away from us and the whole damned human race goes down the drain."

"It was deeply a part of Lee's kindness and understanding that man's right to kill himself is inviolable, but sometimes a friend can make it unnecessary."

"To feel completely alone and isolated leads to mental disintegration just as physical starvation leads to death."

"I know that things get worse before they get better because that's what my psychiatrist says, but this is a worse that feels too big."

"Billy covered his head with his blanket again. He always covered his head when his mother came to see him in the mental ward - always got much sicker until she went away...She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn't really like life at all."

"Some people count sheep. I self-loathe."
Explore more quotes by David Foster Wallace

"You know, the whole thing about perfectionism. The perfectionism is very dangerous. Because of course if your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything. Because doing anything results in...it's actually kind of tragic because you sacrifice how gorgeous and perfect it is in your head for what it really is. And there were a couple of years where I really struggled with that."

"I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader."

"Why do prostitutes when they get straight always try and get so prim? It's like long-repressed librarian-ambitions come flooding out."

"One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism."

"A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane."

"The patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers, who are usually talking on cell phones as they cut people off in order to get just twenty stupid feet ahead in the traffic jam..."

"Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes."

"I think I was very often bored as a child, but boredom is not what I knew it as-what I knew was that I worried a lot."
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