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"Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?""I give.""You get someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog."
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"Don't panic. Are you sitting? You probably don't need to sit. Well, possibly. At least lean on something."

"Ma'am,' Augustus said, nodding toward her, 'your daughter's car has just been deservedly egged by a blind man. Please close the door and go back inside or we'll be forced to call the police.' After wavering for a moment, Monica's mom closed the door and disappeared."

"At this, Gansey rolled over onto his back and folded his hands on his chest. He wore a salmon polo shirt, which, in Blue's opinion, was far more hellish than anything they'd discussed to this point."

"I liked that he was a tenured professor in the Department of Slightly Crooked Smiles with a dual appointments in the Department of Having a Voice that Made My Skin Feel More Like Skin."

"What is it with you today? says Christina on the way to breakfast. Her eyes are stillswollen from sleep and her tangled hair forms a fuzzy halo around her face."Oh, you know, I say. "Sun shining. Birds chirping.She raises an eyebrow at me, as if reminding me that we are in an undergroundtunnel."

"In a way, a lot of my humor comes from presenting things that are dramatic or shocking and then people not having socially appropriate responses, having people denying the drama by failing to react to it, and that's a really classic form of humor."
Explore more quotes by David Foster Wallace

"Let me put it this way: You cannot live in the world without being in pain, spiritual and physical pain. We have developed mechanisms to deal with these pains, to overcome them somehow. Therapy, religion and spirituality, relationships, material success. All this can work, but also become a problem itself. The pursuit of happiness has even been put into the American constitution a couple centuries ago. Today we're so rich, we own much more than we need, we have liberties unknown before, even though they are endangered in the current political climate in the US - and we forget how wonderful it nevertheless is, compared to most other political and economic systems. We have a saying that goes: Give a man enough rope and he hangs himself."

"JAY: Why is a story more upfront than life?LENORE: It just seems more honest, somehow.JAY: Honest meaning closer to the truth?LENORE: I smell trap.JAY: I smell breakthrough. The truth is that there's no difference between a life and a story? But a life pretends to be something more? But it really isn't more?LENORE: I would kill for a shower."

"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."

"When I say or write something, there are actually a whole lot of different things I am communicating. The propositional content (i.e., the verbal information I'm trying to convey) is only one part of it. Another part is stuff about me, the communicator. Everyone knows this. It's a function of the fact there are so many different well-formed ways to say the same basic thing, from e.g. "I was attacked by a bear!" to "Goddamn bear tried to kill me!" to "That ursine juggernaut did essay to sup upon my person!" and so on."

"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."
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