David Foster Wallace Zitate

„Die wirklich wichtige Freiheit erfordert Aufmerksamkeit, und Offenheit und Disziplin und Mühe und die Empathie, andere Menschen wirklich ernst zu nehmen und Opfer für sie zu bringen, wieder und wieder, auf unendlich verschiedene Weisen, völlig unsexy, Tag für Tag.“

„Die Wahrheit wird dich frei machen. Aber nicht, bis es mit dir fertig ist.“

„Jeder ist in seinem geheimen, unausgesprochenen Glauben identisch, so dass er sich von allen anderen unterscheidet.“

„Mario, was bekommst du, wenn du einen Schlaflosen, einen Agnostiker und einen Legastheniker kreuzt? "

"Ich gebe auf."

"Man bekommt jemanden, der die ganze Nacht wach bleibt und sich mental mit der Frage foltert, ob es einen Hund gibt oder nicht."“

„Alles Unerträgliche ist im Kopf, weil der Kopf nicht in der Gegenwart verweilt, sondern die Mauern hochklettert, Erkundigungen einzieht und mit unerträglichen Nachrichten zurückkommt, die man dann irgendwie glaubt.“

„Die wirklich wichtige Art der Freiheit beinhaltet Aufmerksamkeit und Bewusstsein, Disziplin und Anstrengung, und die Fähigkeit, sich wirklich um andere Menschen zu sorgen, für Sie Opfer zu bringen, jeden Tag auf neue auf unzählige, kleine, unsittliche Arten und Weisen.“

„Ich tue so Dinge wie in ein Taxi zu steigen und zu sagen: "Zur Bücherei, und geben Sie gas!"“

„Dass es perverserweise oft mehr Spaß macht, etwas zu wollen, als es zu haben.“

“That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.”

“I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.”

“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?”

“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?”

“… logical validity is not a guarantee of truth.”

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

“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.”

“… it takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak.”

“The man who knows his limitations, has none.”

“… we live in an era of terrible preoccupation with presentation and interpretation, one in which relations between who someone is and what he believes and how he "expresses himself" have been thrown into big time flux.”

“There’s been time this whole time. You can’t kill time with your heart. Everything takes time.”

“If, by the virtue of charity or the circumstance of desperation, you ever chance to spend a little time around a Substance-recovery halfway facility like Enfield MA’s state-funded Ennet House, you will acquire many exotic new facts…That certain persons simply will not like you no matter what you do. That sleeping can be a form of emotional escape and can with sustained effort be abused. That purposeful sleep-deprivation can also be an abusable escape. That you do not have to like a person in order to learn from him/her/it. That loneliness is not a function of solitude. That logical validity is not a guarantee of truth. That it takes effort to pay attention to any one stimulus for more than a few seconds. That boring activities become, perversely, much less boring if you concentrate intently on them. That if enough people in a silent room are drinking coffee it is possible to make out the sound of steam coming off the coffee. That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack. That concentrating intently on anything is very hard work. That 99% of compulsive thinkers’ thinking is about themselves; that 99% of this self-directed thinking consists of imagining and then getting ready for things that are going to happen to them; and then, weirdly, that if they stop to think about it, that 100% of the things they spend 99% of their time and energy imagining and trying to prepare for all the contingencies and consequences of are never good. In short that 99% of the head’s thinking activity consists of trying to scare the everliving shit out of itself. That it is possible to make rather tasty poached eggs in a microwave oven. That some people’s moms never taught them to cover up or turn away when they sneeze. That the people to be the most frightened of are the people who are the most frightened. That it takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak. That no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable. That other people can often see things about you that you yourself cannot see, even if those people are stupid. That having a lot of money does not immunize people from suffering or fear. That trying to dance sober is a whole different kettle of fish. That different people have radically different ideas of basic personal hygiene. That, perversely, it is often more fun to want something than to have it. That if you do something nice for somebody in secret, anonymously, without letting the person you did it for know it was you or anybody else know what it was you did or in any way or form trying to get credit for it, it’s almost its own form of intoxicating buzz. That anonymous generosity, too, can be abused. That it is permissible to want. That everybody is identical in their unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else. That this isn’t necessarily perverse. That there might not be angels, but there are people who might as well be angels.”

“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”

“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.”

“Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?"

"I give."

"You get someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog.”

“Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.”

“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.”

“How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.”

“It's weird to feel like you miss someone you're not even sure you know.”

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

“Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself.”

“It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.”

“Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.”

“I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously.”

“In Caesars Palace is America conceived as a new kind of Rome: conqueror of its own people. An empire of self.”

“What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves, they've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.”

“Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.”

“I had kind of a midlife crisis at twenty which probably doesn’t augur well for my longevity”

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