Shelby

Add friend
Sign in to Goodreads to learn more about Shelby.


I See You've Call...
Shelby is currently reading
bookshelves: currently-reading
Rate this book
Clear rating

progress: 
 
  (0%)
"DNF at 43%. I’m so bored" Jan 24, 2026 07:13AM

 
The Gifts of Impe...
Shelby is currently reading
by Brené Brown (Goodreads Author)
Rate this book
Clear rating

 
Loading...
David Foster Wallace
“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

David Foster Wallace
“This story ["The Depressed Person"] was the most painful thing I ever wrote. It's about narcissism, which is a part of depression. The character has traits of myself. I really lost friends while writing on that story, I became ugly and unhappy and just yelled at people. The cruel thing with depression is that it's such a self-centered illness - Dostoevsky shows that pretty good in his "Notes from Underground". The depression is painful, you're sapped/consumed by yourself; the worse the depression, the more you just think about yourself and the stranger and repellent you appear to others.”
David Foster Wallace

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

David Foster Wallace
“Because here's something else that's weird but true: 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. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.”
David Foster Wallace , This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

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

376 Literary Fiction by People of Color — 13156 members — last activity 21 hours, 17 min ago
This can include genre fiction that is literary (e.g. speculative fiction, historical fiction, etc.), as long as it's written by a person of color (Af ...more
year in books
Autumn
136 books | 15 friends

Amanda ...
714 books | 83 friends

Mallore...
334 books | 88 friends





Polls voted on by Shelby

Lists liked by Shelby