David Foster Wallace Quotes About Children
-
In reality, genuine epiphanies are extremely rare. In contemporary adult life maturation & acquiescence to reality are gradual processes. Modern usage usually deploys epiphany as a metaphor. It is usually only in dramatic representations, religious iconography, and the 'magical thinking' of children that insight is compressed to a sudden blinding flash.
→ -
But the young educated adults of the 90s -- who were, of course, the children of the same impassioned infidelities and divorces Mr. Updike wrote about so beautifully -- got to watch all this brave new individualism and self-expression and sexual freedom deteriorate into the joyless and anomic self-indulgence of the Me Generation. Today's sub-40s have different horrors, prominent among which are anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without once having loved something more than yourself.
→ -
If you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do it
→ -
It was when I was the age where you can, as they say, "hear voices" without worrying that something is wrong with you. I "heard voices" all the time as a small child.
→ -
I was never the sort of child who believed in "monsters under the bed" or vampires, or who needed a night-light in his bedroom; on the contrary, my father...once laughingly told my mother that he thought I might suffer from a type of benign psychosis called "antiparanoia," in which I seemed to believe that I was the object of an intricate universal conspiracy to make me so happy I could hardly stand it.
→ -
If you've never wept and want to, have a child.
→ -
I perhaps could have been somewhat better. One of the interesting things about playing competitive sports as a child is that you confront your own limitations rather starkly at a certain point.
→
David Foster Wallace
- Born: February 21, 1962
- Died: September 12, 2008
- Occupation: Novelist
Related Authors
-
Zadie Smith Novelist -
Philip Roth Novelist -
Don DeLillo Writer -
James Joyce Novelist -
William Gaddis Novelist -
James Ponsoldt Film director -
Jonathan Franzen Novelist -
John Updike Novelist -
Dave Eggers Writer -
Jonathan Safran Foer Writer -
David Lipsky Author -
David Lynch Film director -
George Saunders Writer -
Kurt Vonnegut Writer -
Cormac McCarthy Novelist -
Jeffrey Eugenides Novelist -
Mary Karr Poet -
Thomas Pynchon Novelist -
Jason Segel Actor