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What's your story? It's all in the telling. Stories are compases and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. [...]

[...] These are the gods we worship: whatever coincidental Substances might promise perfect release. God has himself regularly been conceived along these lines. And the heavens where he resides have often been described as a finally satisfying place reachable only by way of death. [...]

[...] Achievement can be more dangerous than failure. At least failure leaves you with the fantasy of some uppercase Substance. But imagine what happens when "you attain the goal and realize the shocking realization that attaining the goal does not complete or redeem you, does not make everything f…

[...] Desire naturally assumes that its own intensity is strong evidence for the existence of a correspondingly intense satisfaction. Desire assumes some correlative Substance. It invests its idol with the promise of release. But there is no such substance. [...] Desires wants to desire. It blindly…

[...] when life starts to feel insubstantial, you may be tempted to abuse substances. Wallace hints at this connection between feeling insubstantial and the abuse of substances by consistently writing "Substance abuse" with a capital "S". He does so because part of what's at stake in substance abus…