Frases de David Foster Wallace

“A Verdade com V grande tem a ver com a vida antes da morte.
Tem a ver com chegar aos trinta, ou talvez até aos cinquenta, sem querer dar um tiro na cabeça.
Tem a ver com o verdadeiro valor de uma verdadeira educação, que não tem nada a ver com notas ou diplomas académicos e tudo a ver com a simples consciência - consciência daquilo que é tão real e essencial, que está escondido à vista desarmada de todos nós, que temos de estar sempre a lembrar a nós mesmos:
A água é isto.
A água é isto.”

“É questão de certo interesse perceber que as artes populares dos EUA da virada do milênio tratam a anedonia e o vazio interno como coisas descoladas e cool. De repente são vestígios da glorificação romântica do mundo e sofisticada e aí consumida por pessoas mais jovens que não apenas consomem arte mas a examinam em busca de pistas de como ser chique, cool - e não esqueça que, para os jovens em geral, ser chique e cool é o mesmo que ser admirado, aceito e incluído e portanto assolitário. Esqueça a dita pressão-dos-pares. É mais tipo uma fome-de-pares. Não? Nós entramos numa puberdade espiritual em que nos ligamos ao fato de que o grande horror transcendente é a solidão, fora o enjaulamento em si próprio. Depois que chegamos a essa idade, nós agora daremos ou aceitaremos qualquer coisa, usaremos qualquer máscara para nos encaixar, ser parte-de, não estar Sós, nós os jovens. As artes dos EU são o nosso guia para a inclusão. Um modo-de-usar. Elas nos mostram como construir máscaras de tédio e de ironia cínica ainda jovens, quando o rosto é maleável o suficiente para assumir a forma daquilo que vier a usar. E aí ele se prende ao rosto, o cinismo cansado que nos salva do sentimentalismo brega e do simplismo não sofisticado. Sentimento é igual a simplismo neste continente (ao menos desde a Reconfiguração). […] Hal, que é vazio mas não é besta, teoriza privadamente que o que passa pela transcendência descolada do sentimentalismo é na verdade algum tipo de medo de ser realmente humano, já que ser realmente humano (ao menos como ele conceitualiza essa ideia) é provavelmente ser inevitavelmente sentimental, simplista, pró-brega e patético de modo geral, é ser de alguma maneira básica e interior para sempre infantil, um tipo de bebê de aparência meio estranha que se arrasta anacliticamente pelo mapa, com grandes olhos úmidos e uma pele macia de sapo, crânio enorme, baba gosmenta. Uma das coisas realmente americanas no Hal, provavelmente, é como ele despreza o que na verdade gera a sua solidão: esse horrendo eu interno, incontinente de sentimentos e necessidades, que lamenta e se contorce logo abaixo da máscara vazia e descolada, a anedonia.”

“Que todas as pessoas são iguais na sua secreta e silenciosa crença de que no fundo são diferentes de todas as outras.”

“Mario, o que você ganha quando você atravessa um insone, um agnóstico sem vontade e um disléxico?

"Eu dou."

"Você pega alguém que fica acordado a noite toda se torturando mentalmente sobre a questão de haver ou não um cachorro.”

“Que você se tornará menos preocupado com o que as outras pessoas pensam de você quando você percebe o quão raramente elas o fazem.”

“Nada disso tem a ver com moralidade, religião, dogmas ou grandes questões sobre a vida após a morte. A verdade com V maiúsculo diz respeito à vida antes da morte. Diz respeito a chegar aos trinta, ou quem sabe aos cinquenta, sem querer dar um tiro na cabeça. Diz respeito ao valor real de uma verdadeira educação, que não tem nada a ver com notas e diplomas e tudo a ver com simples consciência - consciência daquilo que é tão real e essencial, que está tão escondido à luz do dia onde quer que se olhe que precisamos repetir para nós mesmos a todo momento: "Isto é água, isto é água; esses esquimós podem ser bem mais do que aparentam". É incrivelmente difícil fazer isso, ter uma vida consciente e adulta, dia após dia. E com isso mais um clichê se prova verdadeiro: a nossa educação leva mesmo a vida toda, e ela começa: agora.

Desejo a vocês muito mais que sorte.”

“A verdade é aquilo que te torna livre. Mas só depois de ter acabado contigo.”

“Que fazer amor com alguém de quem não se gosta dá uma sensação de maior solidão do que não se tivesse feito.”

“Manhãs de escala são um momento especial para o semiagorafóbico, porque quase todo mundo deixa o navio e vai para a terra firme participar de Passeios Organizados ou fazer turismo peripatético espontâneo e os conveses superiores da e. m. Nadir assumem a mesma qualidade fantasmagórica e misteriosa da sua casa quando você é criança, adoece e fica em casa quando todo mundo saiu para o trabalho ou a escola etc.”

“Eu faço coisas como entrar em um táxi e dizer: "A biblioteca, e pise nela.”

“That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.”

“I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.”

“We're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we've never even met?”

“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?”

“… logical validity is not a guarantee of truth.”

“Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”

“True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world.”

“… it takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak.”

“The man who knows his limitations, has none.”

“… we live in an era of terrible preoccupation with presentation and interpretation, one in which relations between who someone is and what he believes and how he "expresses himself" have been thrown into big time flux.”

“There’s been time this whole time. You can’t kill time with your heart. Everything takes time.”

“If, by the virtue of charity or the circumstance of desperation, you ever chance to spend a little time around a Substance-recovery halfway facility like Enfield MA’s state-funded Ennet House, you will acquire many exotic new facts…That certain persons simply will not like you no matter what you do. That sleeping can be a form of emotional escape and can with sustained effort be abused. That purposeful sleep-deprivation can also be an abusable escape. That you do not have to like a person in order to learn from him/her/it. That loneliness is not a function of solitude. That logical validity is not a guarantee of truth. That it takes effort to pay attention to any one stimulus for more than a few seconds. That boring activities become, perversely, much less boring if you concentrate intently on them. That if enough people in a silent room are drinking coffee it is possible to make out the sound of steam coming off the coffee. That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack. That concentrating intently on anything is very hard work. That 99% of compulsive thinkers’ thinking is about themselves; that 99% of this self-directed thinking consists of imagining and then getting ready for things that are going to happen to them; and then, weirdly, that if they stop to think about it, that 100% of the things they spend 99% of their time and energy imagining and trying to prepare for all the contingencies and consequences of are never good. In short that 99% of the head’s thinking activity consists of trying to scare the everliving shit out of itself. That it is possible to make rather tasty poached eggs in a microwave oven. That some people’s moms never taught them to cover up or turn away when they sneeze. That the people to be the most frightened of are the people who are the most frightened. That it takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak. That no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable. That other people can often see things about you that you yourself cannot see, even if those people are stupid. That having a lot of money does not immunize people from suffering or fear. That trying to dance sober is a whole different kettle of fish. That different people have radically different ideas of basic personal hygiene. That, perversely, it is often more fun to want something than to have it. That if you do something nice for somebody in secret, anonymously, without letting the person you did it for know it was you or anybody else know what it was you did or in any way or form trying to get credit for it, it’s almost its own form of intoxicating buzz. That anonymous generosity, too, can be abused. That it is permissible to want. That everybody is identical in their unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else. That this isn’t necessarily perverse. That there might not be angels, but there are people who might as well be angels.”

“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.”

“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.”

“How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.”

“It's weird to feel like you miss someone you're not even sure you know.”

“The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.”

“Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself.”

“It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.”

“Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.”

“I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously.”

“In Caesars Palace is America conceived as a new kind of Rome: conqueror of its own people. An empire of self.”

“What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves, they've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.”

“Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.”

“I had kind of a midlife crisis at twenty which probably doesn’t augur well for my longevity”

“There's good self-consciousness, and then there's toxic, paralyzing, raped-by-psychic-Bedouins self-consciousness.”