David Foster Wallace

"Addiction is not really about the substance—it's about needing to escape the self."

"Sometimes human beings have to just have faith."

"Watch the pretense fall away from people's faces."

"The so-called 'real world' will not discourage you from overambitious or unrealistic goals—it will destroy you."

"Everything I've ever let go of has claw marks on it."

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

"The hard part is how you make the choice about what to do when the situation is ambiguous."

"The so-called culture industry manufactures despair."

"Consciousness itself is the enemy."

"The modern condition is isolation masked as community."

"We are in the self-promotional business whether we like it or not."

"Complexity is not a way of getting at truth—it's often a way of obscuring it."

"The old cliché about death is that it keeps us from taking ourselves too seriously."

"If you can't be kind, be quiet."

"Infinite regress is death by a thousand cuts."

"The thing about adulthood is that it's mostly about managing discomfort."

"We rarely ask ourselves what makes life seem worth living."

"The secret is that there is no secret."

"What interests me is the architecture of the self and how it breaks down."

"Boredom is a kind of pain too."

"The gift of an unexamined life is that you get to blame everyone else."

"We are not as unique as we imagine."

"Sincerity may be the only cure for irony."

"The real freedom is whether you can turn the telescope around."

"Entertainment culture is about the death of empathy."

"You have to keep choosing the hard thing."

"The work of the poet is to name what hasn't been named."

"Most people in America are terrified of silence."

"Once the moat of entertainment is drained, what's left?"

"The point is that we need to be aware of what we're doing."