R.A. > R.A.'s Quotes

“How far we all come. How far we all come away from ourselves. So far, so much between, you can never go home again. You can go home, it's good to go home, but you never really get all the way home again in your life. And what's it all for? All I tried to be, all I ever wanted and went away for, what's it all for?

Just one way, you do get back home. You have a boy or a girl of your own and now and then you remember, and you know how they feel, and it's almost the same as if you were your own self again, as young as you could remember.

And God knows he was lucky, so many ways, and God knows he was thankful. Everything was good and better than he could have hoped for, better than he ever deserved; only, whatever it was and however good it was, it wasn't what you once had been, and had lost, and could never have again, and once in a while, once in a long time, you remembered, and knew how far you were away, and it hit you hard enough, that little while it lasted, to break your heart.”
― James Agee, A Death in the Family

“All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.”
― walt whitman

“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“The first and final thing you have to do in this world is to last it and not be smashed by it.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bullfighters.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”
― David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

“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

“There's good self-consciousness, and then there's toxic, paralyzing, raped-by-psychic-Bedouins self-consciousness.”
― David Foster Wallace

“What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human [...] is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“You have decided being scared is caused mostly by thinking. ”
― David Foster Wallace

“Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.”
― David Foster Wallace

“We're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we've never even met?”
― David Foster Wallace

“It’s a very American illness, the idea of giving yourself away entirely to the idea of working in order to achieve some sort of brass ring that usually involves people feeling some way about you – I mean, people wonder why we walk around feeling alienated and lonely and stressed out.”
― David Foster Wallace

“And Lo, for the Earth was empty of Form, and void. And Darkness was all over the Face of the Deep. And We said: 'Look at that fucker Dance.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.”
― David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

“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

“True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I'm not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I...”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“The sun like a sneaky keyhole view of hell.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.”
― David Foster Wallace

“I don't think writers are any smarter than other people. I think they may be more compelling in their stupidity, or in their confusion.”
― David Foster Wallace

“I'd like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time, instead of having to go back in my head and enjoy them.”
― David Foster Wallace

“Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it."

[Q&A with Larry McCaffery, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1993, Vol. 13.2]”
― David Foster Wallace

“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest