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"You see parents as kind or unkind or happy or miserable or drunk or sober or great or near-great or failed the way you see a table square or a Montclair lip-read. Kids today... you kids today somehow don't know how to feel, much less love, to say nothing of respect. We're just bodies to you. We're just bodies and shoulders and scarred knees and big bellies and empty wallets and flasks to you. I'm not saying something cliché like you take us for granted so much as I'm saying you cannot... imagine our absence. We're so present it's ceased to mean. We're environmental. Furniture of the world."
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"Daddy is trying really fugging hard to think of a not-terrifying reason why you'd wake Daddy up in the middle of the night to ask that fugging question. But no. No. Daddy does not have a match or a lighter."
Explore more quotes by David Foster Wallace
"It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art."
"The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish."
"It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed ... If a person in physical pain has a hard time attending to anything except that pain, a clinically depressed person cannot even perceive any other person or thing as independent of the universal pain that is digesting her cell by cell."
"Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly."
"Bliss-a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious-lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you've never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it's like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom."
"The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, "then" what do we do?"
"He could do the dextral pain the same way: Abiding. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering. And the projected future fear. ... It's too much to think about. To Abide there. But none of it's as of now real. ... He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over. What's unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. ... But he could choose not to listen."
"Why do prostitutes when they get straight always try and get so prim? It's like long-repressed librarian-ambitions come flooding out."
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