David Foster Wallace, in the house:

"There are no choices without personal freedom, Buckeroo. It's not us who are dead inside. These things you find so weak and contemptible in us---these are just the hazards of being free." 
— from Infinite Jest

"Logical validity is not a guarantee of truth." 
— from Infinite Jest

"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." 


— from Infinite Jest

"Both destiny's kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person's basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer." 


"Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still." 
— from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

"...morning is the soul's night." 
—  from Infinite Jest

"Mediocrity is contextual." 
—  from Infinite Jest

"But if I decide to decide there’s a different, less selfish, less lonely point to my life, won’t the reason for this decision be my desire to be less lonely, meaning to suffer less overall pain? Can the decision to be less selfish ever be anything other than a selfish decision?" 
— from Consider the Lobster: and other Essays


"Words and a book and a belief that the world is words..." 
— from The Broom of the System


"No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home." 
— from Consider the Lobster: and other Essays


"To experience commitment as the loss of options, a type if death, the death of childhood's limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress-this will happen, mark me. Childhood's end." 
— from The Pale King


"life's endless war against the self you cannot live without." 
— from Infinite Jest


"I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. "
— from Infinite Jest