David Foster Wallace Quotes

Modern life. Where are we running? Sometimes what we want is not always where we are... Are we alone? Is the real winter inside our hearts? We are all struggling for definition in a world that resists our increase.

When I was young I read 'L'Etranger' by Camus, and it made me aware of the strangeness of life.

To live is to feel oneself lost.

Both Frankenstein and the Hulk are looked at as horrific, but they're just trying to find their way, like all of us.

Starting with the lyrics, 'Only scared of myself and the truth in the stars/I'm a king, I'm the dirt, God within me shine,' the first half of '6 Weeks' delves into my attempts to balance the notion that I have an existential purpose with the realization that I am nothing against the vastness of the universe.

No destiny attacks us from outside. But, within him, man bears his fate and there comes a moment when he knows himself vulnerable; and then, as in a vertigo, blunder upon blunder lures him.

Man has always been his own most vexing problem.

Perhaps I am no one. True, I have a body and I cannot escape from it. I would like to fly out of my head, but that is out of the question.

Without a sense of identity, there can be no real struggle.

We have long struggles with ourself, of which the outcome is one of our actions; they are, as it were, the inner side of human nature. This inner side is God's; the outer side belongs to men.

I am nothing but I must be everything.

To every man who struggles with his own soul in mystery, a book that is a book flowers once, and seeds, and is gone.

Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?

When I am battered and oppressed by the world that humanity has made - which is difference from the world that is was given - my primary defense, my consolation, is the absurdity of that world

Through everything I have passed but nowhere I have been.

Because we are all poets or babies in the middle of the night, struggling with being.

I came into this world anxious to uncover the meaning of things, my soul desirous to be at origin of the world, and here I am an object among other objects.

These are not easy questions. Who am I? Why am I here? They're not easy because the human being isn't wired to function as an individual.

What is Man? A miserable little pile of secrets.

I was just struggling with my inner vachette and pondering the depths of my own inhumanity.

I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects.

Midway along the journey of our life I woke to find myself in a dark wood, for I had wandered off from the straight path. How hard it is to tell what it was like, this wood of wilderness, savage and stubborn (the thought of it brings back all my old fears), a bitter place! Death could scarce be bitterer. But if I would show the good that came of it I must talk about things other than the good.

During really difficult times in my life when I start questioning why I am struggling with something, I often turn to books to understand myself better.

Death was not the opposite of life. It was already here, within my being, it had always been here, and no struggle would permit me to forget that.