David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) was a highly influential and versatile American novelist, short-story writer, and essayist. He is especially known for his dark humor, verbosity, and philosophical insight, and his satirical analysis of American culture. Before he committed suicide in 2008, he was considered one of America’s most promising young novelists.
Born in Ithaca, New York, Wallace became a literary celebrity following the publication of his second novel, Infinite Jest (1996,) a voluminous (1,079 pages long with 388 footnotes,) multilayered novel that he wrote over four years.
Wallace’s short stories are collected in Girl with Curious Hair (1989,) Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999,) and Oblivion (2004.) He was also a highly praised nonfiction writer, using his signature digressive, footnote-heavy writing style to produce detailed essays. His essay collections include A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1997) and Consider the Lobster, and Other Essays (2005.) Wallace also published Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (2003,) a discourse on mathematics, one of his many intellectual passions.
Wallace had suffered from depression since his early twenties, and, after numerous failed attempts to find a practical course of therapy, he took his own life in 2008.
In 2005, Wallace gave a commencement address at Kenyon College on the significance of leading a compassionate life. The touching speech was reprinted in the Wall Street Journal and the Times of London before being published in book form as This Is Water (2009.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by David Foster Wallace
The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.
—David Foster Wallace
Real leaders help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.
—David Foster Wallace
The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing…It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out.
—David Foster Wallace
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?
—David Foster Wallace
Topics: Loneliness
He didn’t reject the idea so much as not react to it and watch as it floated away.
—David Foster Wallace
Topics: Rationality
No matter how smart you thought you were, you are actually way less smart than that.
—David Foster Wallace
What are envied and coveted here seem to me to be qualities of human beings—capacities of spirit—rather than technical abilities or special talents.
—David Foster Wallace
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