Quotes · Skopia

12 quotes

SortEditorial Year Length

Person·David Foster Wallace✕clear

In reality there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.

David Foster Wallace

2000

★ 1.0

Both destiny's kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person's basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer.

David Foster Wallace

Infinite Jest · 1996

★ 1.9

Essay · Journal

Make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us.

David Foster Wallace

1993

★ 2.0

I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it."

David Foster Wallace

Infinite Jest · 1996

★ 2.9

Speech · Commencement address

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

David Foster Wallace

2005 Kenyon College commencement address · 2005

★ 3.5

Essay · Magazine

Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?

David Foster Wallace

Gourmet · 2004

★ 3.6

Speech · Commencement address

Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe.

David Foster Wallace

2005 Kenyon College commencement address · 2005

★ 3.6

Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.

David Foster Wallace

Infinite Jest · 1996

★ 3.7

Speech · Commencement address

The mind is an excellent servant but a terrible master.

David Foster Wallace

2005 Kenyon College commencement address · 2005

★ 3.7

"Acceptance" is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.

David Foster Wallace

Infinite Jest · 1996

★ 4.6

Speech · Commencement address

The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty, unsexy ways, every day.

David Foster Wallace

2005

★ 5.2

The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.

David Foster Wallace

Infinite Jest · 1996

★ 5.5