“Because one day people will stop reading Bloody Romeo and his Crap Dead Girlfriend and they will all sit in classrooms watching Youtubery from THE PAST that is now and reading BLOGGAGE instead and writing essays about magnificent us.”

“One evening, after he’d read a piece about yet another savagery in Bosnia, I saw there were tears in his eyes. ‘Don’t it ever stop?’ he said. ‘I can mind Father telling that there’d be no more wars, not after his one. It shames me. It shames all of us. What’s the good in reading, if that’s all there is to read about?”

“Too many people learn about war with no inconvenience to themselves. They read about Verdun or Stalingrad without comprehension, sitting in a comfortable armchair, with their feet beside the fire, preparing to go about their business the next day, as usual. One should really read such accounts under compulsion, in discomfort, considering oneself fortunate not to be describing the events in a letter home, writing from a hole in the mud. One should read about war in the worst circumstances, when everything is going badly, remembering that the torments of peace are trivial, and not worth any white hairs. Nothing is really serious in the tranquility of peace; only an idiot could be really disturbed by a question of salary. One should read about war standing up, late at night, when one is tired, as I am writing about it now, at dawn, while my asthma attack wears off. And even now, in my sleepless exhaustion, how gentle and easy peace seems!”

“I will not be quoting Hemingway anytime soon, nor will I ever read another one of his books.And if he were still alive, I would write him a letter right now and threaten to strangle him dead with my bare hands just for being so glum.No wonder he put a gun to his head, like it says in the introductory essay.”

“He would go somewhere no one knew him, and he would sit in a library all day and read books and listen to people breathing.”

“Books are a social substitute; you read people who, at one level, you'd like to hang out with. [David Foster Wallace]'s writing self--it's most pronounced in his essays--was the best friend you'd ever have, spotting everything, whispering jokes, sweeping you past what was irritating or boring or awful in humane style.”