David Foster Wallace Quotes About Giving

Quotes about: Giving

• 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.

  David Foster Wallace

  Dog, Night, Giving

• The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home.

  David Foster Wallace

  Home, Thinking, Giving

  "'Plain Old Untrendy Troubles and Emotions'". www.theguardian.com. September 19, 2008.

• 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

  Lonely, Mean, Order

• It now lately sometimes seemed a black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe.

  David Foster Wallace

  Caring, Years, People

• American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.

  David Foster Wallace

  People, Giving, Secret

• Our attachments are our temple, what we worship, no? What we give ourselves to, what we invest with faith. . . . Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care.

  David Foster Wallace

  Attachment, Giving, Care

  David Foster Wallace (2011). “Infinite Jest”, p.83, Hachette UK

• Some persons can give themselves away to an ambitious pursuit and have that be all the giving-themselves-away-to-something they need to do. Though sometimes this changes as the players get older and the pursuit more stress-fraught. American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.

  David Foster Wallace

  Stress, Player, People

• Certain sincerely devout and spiritually advanced people believe that the God of their understanding helps them find parking places and gives them advice on Mass. Lottery numbers.

  David Foster Wallace

  Believe, Numbers, People

  David Foster Wallace (2011). “Infinite Jest”, p.147, Hachette UK

• Boo, I think I no longer believe in monsters as faces in the floor or feral infants or vampires or whatever. I think at seventeen now I believe the only real monsters might be the type of liar where there's simply no way to tell. The ones who give nothing away.

  David Foster Wallace

  Real, Liars, Believe

  David Foster Wallace (2011). “Infinite Jest”, p.519, Hachette UK

• The greatest sin is appearing naive or old-fashioned so that somebody can give you a sort of a very cool arch smile and devastate you with one extraordinarily crafted line that puts kind of a hole in your pretentious balloon.

  David Foster Wallace

  Giving, Arches, Lines

  Source: news.stlpublicradio.org

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