“[L]earning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.”

The late David Foster Wallace, in a 2005 speech at Kenyon College.

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On Wednesday, I made an obscure reference to Infinite Jest, which is probably the one and only time I’ve referenced the works of David Foster Wallace — a literary hero of mine — in the history of anything I’ve written ever.

On Friday, David Foster Wallace hung himself at his home in Claremont, California. He was 46.

Wallace is also the author of the brilliant Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, which was just made into a movie — directed by John Krasinski.

You were the best, dude. The best. I’m sorry you didn’t find what you were looking for.