David Foster Wallace Quote
If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.
If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.
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About David Foster Wallace
Wallace grew up in Illinois. He graduated from Amherst College and the University of Arizona. His honors thesis at Amherst, about modal logic, was adapted into his debut novel The Broom of the System (1987). In his writing, Wallace intentionally avoided tropes of postmodern art such as irony or forms of metafiction, saying in 1990 that they were "agents of a great despair and stasis" in contemporary American culture. Infinite Jest, his second novel, is known for its unconventional narrative structure and extensive use of endnotes.
Wallace published three short story collections: Girl with Curious Hair (1989); Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999), which was adapted into a 2009 film; and Oblivion: Stories (2004). His short stories and essays were published in outlets like The New Yorker and Rolling Stone magazines, and three collections of his essays were published as books: A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (1997); Consider the Lobster (2005); and Both Flesh and Not (2012). Wallace also taught English and creative writing at Emerson College, Illinois State University, and Pomona College.
In 2008, after struggling with depression for many years, Wallace died by suicide at age 46. His unfinished novel The Pale King was published in 2011 and was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.