Tom > Tom's Quotes

“The truth is that the heroism of your childhood entertainments was not true valor. It was theatre. The grand gesture, the moment of choice, the mortal danger, the external foe, the climactic battle whose outcome resolves all--all designed to appear heroic, to excite and gratify and audience. Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality--there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand? Here is the truth--actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“To experience commitment as the loss of options, a type of death, the death of childhood's limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress-this will happen, mark me. Childhood's end.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“For those who've never experienced a sunrise in the rural midwest, it's roughly as soft and romantic as someone's abruptly hitting the lights in a dark room.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“Two hearted, a hypocrite to yourself either way”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“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.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“One can build a perfect home, but not live in it.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Here I Am

“Parents don't have the luxury of being reasonable, not any more than a religious person does. What can make religious people and parents so utterly insufferable is also what makes religion and Parenthood so utterly beautiful: the All or nothing wager. The Faith.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Here I Am

“Without context, we'd all be monsters.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Here I Am

“There is something fierce and starved about first ideas.”
― John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van

“Virtually all political discourse in the days of my youth was devoted to the ferreting out of hypocrisy... Because they were hypocrites, the Victorians were despised in the late twentieth century. Many of the persons who held such opinions were, of course, guilty of the most nefarious conduct themselves, and yet saw no paradox in holding such views because they were not hypocrites themselves-they took no moral stances and lived by none.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

“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.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“I am coming to see that the sensation of the worst nightmares, a sensation that can be felt asleep or awake, is identical to those worst dreams' form itself: the sudden intra-dream realization that the nightmares' very essence and center has been with you all along, even awake: it's just been... overlooked.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Listen to your patient; he is telling you the diagnosis.”
― William Osler

“While I was writing the previous paragraph, I was prompted again to look at the photograph of the young actress and to compare that image with the image presently in my mind, but then I recalled that I had sold most of my books before moving from the city where I had lived for most of my life to this township near the border.
I had sold the books because this house where I now live is a mere cottage with space for only a few hundred books. I had sold the books also in order to keep faith with myself. For some years past, I had claimed that whatever deserved to be remembered from my experiences as a reader of books was, in fact, safely remembered. I had claimed also the converse of this: whatever I had forgotten from my experiences as a reader of books had not deserved to be remembered.”
― Gerald Murnane, Border Districts

“Man muss das Leben leben, das ist alles, schlicht und einfach. Ein fetter Saufbruder hat's mir neulich beim Verlassen der Bar zum falschen Weg nachgerufen. Literatur ist nichts wert.”
― Roberto Bolaño

“Erinnerungen, die leuchten wie ein Betrunkener oder Kranker im Regen.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives