In short, not only was it surprising to be greeted in person with such enthusiastic words, but it was doubly surprising when the person reciting these words displayed the same kind of disengagement as, say, the checkout clerk who utters the words 'Have a nice day' while her expression indicates that it's really a matter of total indifference to her whether you drop dead in the parking lot outside ten seconds from now. David Foster Wallace
About This Quote

This quote is so true about how some people act. It makes you wonder why they even greet you in the first place. What is the purpose of doing so? Is it to say hello? To see if the person is alive? Or, are they just observing you for some reason?

Source: The Pale King

Some Similar Quotes
  1. A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment. - Jane Austen

  2. What's this?" he demanded, looking from Clary to his companions, as if they might know what she was doing there." It's a girl, " Jace said, recovering his composure. "Surely you've seen girls before, Alec. Your sister Isabelle is one. - Cassandra Clare

  3. Welcome to the wonderful world of jealousy, he thought. For the price of admission, you get a splitting headache, a nearly irresistable urge to commit murder, and an inferiority complex. Yippee. - J.r. Ward

  4. I'm saying that I'm a moody, insecure, narrow-minded, jealous, borderline homicidal bitch, and I want you to promise me that you're okay with that, because it's who I am, and you're what I need. - Jeaniene Frost

  5. Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love. - Charles M. Schulz

More Quotes By David Foster Wallace
  1. 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.

  2. To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like ‘deadly dull’ or ‘excruciatingly dull’...

  3. Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. <span style="margin:15px; display:block"></span>And...

  4. 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.

  5. 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...

Related Topics