David Foster Wallace

"We worship at the altar of productivity while losing sight of what makes life meaningful."

"The human brain is not equipped to process the amount of information modern life demands."

"What we call the unconscious is really just everything we're too afraid to acknowledge."

"Art is the only human activity that has no use-value, which is precisely its value."

"We're all performing versions of ourselves; the question is whether we know it."

"The tragedy is not that we die but that we live without really living."

"Wisdom is knowing what you don't know and being comfortable with that uncertainty."

"We confuse being connected with actually being understood."

"The real work of being human is doing the things we don't want to do."

"Freedom without purpose is just another form of prison."

"The only real poverty is the poverty of imagination."

"Suffering is the price of consciousness, and consciousness is the price of being human."

"The so-called 'typical' web experience these days is just a portal to loneliness dressed up as connection."

"Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education is that it can make you both more ignorant and less aware of it."

"What if a man could become a better person by means of suffering?"

"The so-called culture war is really about whether we get to avoid reality or not."

"Entertainment is the death of consciousness."

"The real unendurable thing isn't the pain. It's the pain of not being able to escape the pain."

"Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Investors got in early on the money."

"You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do."

"Irony is the song of the trapped."

"The great thing about irony is that it is corrosive."

"Good art often makes you uncomfortable or baffled at first."

"What is pertinent is the calmness of dispassionate attention."

"Real freedom is about the ability to be present and not escape into fantasy."

"Loneliness is the universal condition of modern life."

"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that very existence is an act of rebellion."

"Fiction is about what it is to be human and we are human."

"We are dying from politeness."

"The key to everything is patience."