Chris > Chris's Quotes

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

“Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.”
― David Foster Wallace

“Only once can I say “I’m dying” without telling a lie. The best day of my life may already be behind me.”
― Edouard Leve, Amérique

“Books are truer than movies.”
― Adam Levin, The Instructions

“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.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

“When he was left alone, when he had pulled out one stop after another (for the work required it), Stanley straightened himself on the seat, tightened the knot of the red necktie, and struck. The music soared around him, from the corner of his eye he caught the glitter of his wrist watch, and even as he read the music before him, and saw his thumb and last finger come down time after time with three black keys between them, wringing out fourths, the work he had copied coming over on the Conte di Brescia, wringing that chord of the devil’s interval from the full length of the thirty-foot bass pipes, he did not stop. The walls quivered, still he did not hesitate. Everything moved, and even falling, soared in atonement.

He was the only person caught in the collapse, and afterward, most of his work was recovered too, and it is still spoken of, when it is noted, with high regard, though seldom played.”
― William Gaddis, The Recognitions

“[T]he worst kind of nihilist—the kind who isn't even aware he's a nihilist.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“The future belongs to crowds.”
― Don DeLillo, Mao II

“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

“What's any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What's left of the man when the work's done but a shambles of apology.”
― William Gaddis, The Recognitions

“Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“There is always something left to love.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Knowledge is the harvest of attention”
― Charles Olson

“For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 1

“You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.”
― Peter Handke

“When the child was a child, it didn’t know that it was a child, everything was soulful, and all souls were one.”
― Peter Handke, Song of Childhood

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
― Søren Kierkegaard