Laura > Laura's Quotes

“The next suitable person you’re in light conversation with, you stop suddenly in the middle of the conversation and look at the person closely and say, “What’s wrong?” You say it in a concerned way. He’ll say, “What do you mean?” You say, “Something’s wrong. I can tell. What is it?” And he’ll look stunned and say, “How did you know?” He doesn’t realize something’s always wrong, with everybody. Often more than one thing. He doesn’t know everybody’s always going around all the time with something wrong and believing they’re exerting great willpower and control to keep other people, for whom they think nothing’s ever wrong, from seeing it.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“The thing about people who are truly and malignantly crazy: their real genius is for making the people around them think they themselves are crazy. In military science this is called Psy-Ops, for your info.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love? What if the temple comes to Mohammed? What if you just love? without deciding? You just do: you see her and in that instant are lost to sober account-keeping and cannot choose but to love?”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“My bones are ringing the way sometimes people say their ears are ringing, I'm so tired.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“She had a brainy girls discomfort about her own beauty and its effects on folks.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Hang me upside-down and fuck me in both ears. You pulled yourself out of a clinical depression by being a freaking hero.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“My chest bumps like a dryer with shoes in it.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Be on guard. The road widens, and many of the detours are seductive.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“She wanted only tall smooth bottles whose labels spoke of Proof.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“This wise old whiskery fish swims up to three young fish and goes, 'Morning, boys, how's the water?' and swims away; and the three young fish watch him swim away and look at each other and go, 'What the fuck is water?' and swim away.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“...the sun would leave my sky if I couldn't assume you'd simply come and tell me you were sad.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Here is how to handle being a feral prodigy.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Try to let what is unfair teach you…what is unfair can be a stern but invaluable teacher…you can be shaped, or you can be broken. There is not much in between. Try to learn. Be coachable. Try to learn from everybody, especially those who fail. This is hard.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Johnny Gentle, the first U.S. President ever to swing his microphone around by the cord during his Inauguration speech.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“He has that rare spinal appreciation for beauty in the ordinary that nature seems to bestow on those who have no native words for what they see.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“naïveté is the last true terrible sin in the theology of millennial America.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“It’s hard to be told to lighten up because if you lighten up any more, you’re going to float the fuck away.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays

“Don’t flirt, have sex, or engage in emotional affairs with your friends’ significant others. This shouldn’t need to be said, but it needs to be said. That significant other is an asshole, and you don’t want to be involved with an asshole who’s used goods. If you want to be with an asshole, get a fresh asshole of your very own. They are abundant.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist

“I approach most things in life with a dangerous level of confidence to balance my generally low self-esteem.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist

“Sherman Alexie wrote, “There are millions of teens who read because they are sad and lonely and enraged. They read because they live in an often-terrible world. They read because they believe, despite the callow protestations of certain adults, that books—especially the dark and dangerous ones—will save them.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays

“Some people need a red carpet rolled out in front of them in order to walk forward into friendship. They can't see the tiny outstretched hands all around them, everywhere, like leaves on trees.”
― Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You

“If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting. 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, Up, Simbal!: 7 Days on the Trail of an Anticandidate

“The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.”
― David Foster Wallace

“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?”
― David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

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

“Paranoids are not paranoid because they're paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.”
― Thomas Pynchon

“Once they have you asking the wrong questions. They don't have to worry about the answers.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“Can't say it often enough - change your hair, change your life.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice

“Only in art were there cliches; never in nature. There were no ordinary human beings. Everybody was born with surprise inside.”
― Jincy Willett, The Writing Class

“It now lately sometimes seemed a black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest