top of page
.png){kind=small}
"In school I ended up writing three different papers on "The Castaway" section of Moby-Dick, the chapter where the cabin boy Pip falls overboard and is driven mad by the empty immensity of what he finds himself floating in. And when I teach school now I always teach Crane's horrific "The Open Boat," and get all bent out of shape when the kids find the story dull or jaunty-adventurish: I want them to feel the same marrow-level dread of the oceanic I've always felt, the intuition of the sea as primordial nada, bottomless, depths inhabited by cackling tooth-studded things rising toward you at the rate a feather falls."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Fear quotes
"People need not fear the unknown if they are capable of achieving what they need and want."
"I thought that if I owned nothing, had nothing, was nothing, I would have nothing left to lose, and I wouldn't be scared anymore. Because my whole life I've been so damn scared. Scared to live because I was scared to die. But at the same I was so scared of living, so I wanted to die. Or maybe so scared of dying that I refused to live. You don't have to be afraid to fall, when you're already on the ground. You don't have to be scared to lose someone, when there's no one around to lose."
"When rationality begins to break down, the circuits of the human brain can overload. Axons grow bright and feverish. Hallucinations turn real: the quicksilver puddle at the point where perspective makes parallel lines seem to intersect is really there; the dead walk and talk; a rose begins to sing."
"How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next-if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions-you'd be doomed. You'd be as ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to."
"You have the right to remain silent,' the big cop said in his robot's voice. 'If you do not choose to remain silent, anything you say may be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. I'm going to kill you. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. Do you understand your rights as I have explained them to you?"
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."
"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."
"I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art."
"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."
bottom of page