Will > Will's Quotes

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
― David Foster Wallace

“You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“It was a boring book because it said nothing new and did so in a way that was needlessly academic and gimmicky. He would have been better off writing a book called Infinite Rest that was just the letter ‘z’ ad nauseam for eleven hundred pages.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.”
― John Updike

“The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else. ”
― John Updike

“Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone”
― John Updike

“Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”
― David Foster Wallace

“Madness, mayhem, erotic vandalism, devastation of innumerable souls - while we scream and perish, History licks a finger and turns the page.”
― Thomas Ligotti

“It has always seemed to me that my existence consisted purely and exclusively of nothing but the most outrageous nonsense.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Teatro Grottesco

“All tales, then, are at some level a journey into the woods to find the missing part of us, to retrieve it and make ourselves whole. Storytelling is as simple - and complex - as that. That's the pattern. That's how we tell stories.”
― John Yorke, Into the Woods: A Five Act Journey Into Story

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”
― Mark Twain

“catoptric”
― Brian Greene, The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos

“I keep thinking about all the kids who got wiped out by seventeen years of war movies before coming to Vietnam to get wiped out for good. You don’t know what a media freak is until you’ve seen the way a few of those grunts would run around during a fight when they knew that there was a television crew nearby; they were actually making war movies in their heads, doing little guts-and-glory Leatherneck tap dances under fire, getting their pimples shot off for the networks. They were insane, but the war hadn’t done that to them. Most combat troops stopped thinking of the war as an adventure after their first few firefights, but there were always the ones who couldn’t let that go, these few who were up there doing numbers for the cameras… We’d all seen too many movies, stayed too long in Television City, years of media glut had made certain connections difficult.”
― Michael Herr, Dispatches