David Robson > David's Quotes

“We're all carrying around some shit. When you hear the things people have gone through and realize you've gone through the same, it provides an amazing amount of relief. It give us hope. And I think that's what we're supposed to get from each other. The hope that, maybe, just maybe, we're going to be okay. Maybe.”
― Marc Maron, Attempting Normal

“The truth is that the heroism of your childhood entertainments was not true valor. It was theatre. The grand gesture, the moment of choice, the mortal danger, the external foe, the climactic battle whose outcome resolves all--all designed to appear heroic, to excite and gratify and audience. Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality--there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand? Here is the truth--actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Once, somebody asked Robert Schumann to explain the meaning of a certain piece of music he had just played on the piano.
What Robert Schumann did was sit back down at the piano and play the piece of music again.”
― David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress

“Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were heading for shore.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable. For my part I read only to please myself and like only what suits my taste.”
― Voltaire, Candide

“I am alone in the midst of these happy, reasonable voices. All these creatures spend their time explaining, realizing happily that they agree with each other. In Heaven's name, why is it so important to think the same things all together. ”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“I never truckled, I never took off the hat to fashion and held it out for pennies.”
― Frank Norris, Complete Works of Frank Norris V7: Responsibilities of the Novelist

“It takes, unhappily, no more than a desk and writing supplies to turn any room into a confessional.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human [...] is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“It's weird to feel like you miss someone you're not even sure you know.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“[...] 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.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“--and then you're in serious trouble, very serious trouble, and you know it, finally, deadly serious trouble, because this Substance you thought was your one true friend, that you gave up all for, gladly, that for so long gave you relief from the pain of the Losses your love of that relief caused, your mother and lover and god and compadre, has finally removed its smily-face mask to reveal centerless eyes and a ravening maw, and canines down to here, it's the Face In The Floor, the grinning root-white face of your worst nightmares, and the face is your own face in the mirror, now, it's you, the Substance has devoured or replaced and become you, and the puke-, drool- and Substance-crusted T-shirt you've both worn for weeks now gets torn off and you stand there looking and in the root-white chest where your heart (given away to It) should be beating, in its exposed chest's center and centerless eyes is just a lightless hole, more teeth, and a beckoning taloned hand dangling something irresistible, and now you see you've been had, screwed royal, stripped and fucked and tossed to the side like some stuffed toy to lie for all time in the posture you land in. You see now that It's your enemy and your worst personal nightmare and the trouble It's gotten you into is undeniable and you still can't stop. Doing the Substance now is like attending Black Mass but you still can't stop, even though the Substance no longer gets you high. You are, as they say, Finished. You cannot get drunk and you cannot get sober; you cannot get high and you cannot get straight. You are behind bars; you are in a cage and can see only bars in every direction. You are in the kind of a hell of a mess that either ends lives or turns them around.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“You will say that I am old and mad, was what Michaelangelo wrote, but I answer that there is no better way of being sane and free from anxiety than by being mad.”
― David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress

“No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“I've got death inside me. It's just a question of whether or not I can outlive it.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. ”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“I feel sad for people and the queer part we play in our own disasters.”
― Don DeLillo

“If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then all possibility of life is destroyed.”
― leo tolstoy, War and Peace

“I simply want to live; to cause no evil to anyone but myself.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it, everything belongs. If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know himself. ”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves.”
― Franz Kafka, The Trial

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”
― David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

“The ancient wisdoms are modern nonsenses. Live in your own time, use what we know, and as you grow up, perhaps the human race will finally grow up with you and put aside childish things.”
― Salman Rushdie, Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002

“People with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called *character,* a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to the other, more instantly negotiable virtues.... character--the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life--is the source from which self-respect springs.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem