Top 500 David Foster Wallace Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “The German logician Kant was right in this respect, human beings are all pretty much identical in terms of our hardwiring. Although we are seldom conscious of it, we are all basically just instruments or expressions of our evolkutiuonary drives, which are themselves the expressions of forces that are infinitely larger and more important than we are.”

— David Foster Wallace

452. “That’s why people use terms like flow or effortless to describe writing that they regard as really superb. They’re not saying effortless in terms of it didn’t seem like the writer spent any work. It simply requires no effort to read it – the same way listening to an incredible storyteller talk out loud requires no effort to pay attention. Whereas when you’re bored, you’re conscious of how much effort is required to pay attention.”

— David Foster Wallace

453. “He and Hal exchanged the very slight sorts of nods people use when they like each other past all need for politeness.”

— David Foster Wallace

454. “The wraith responds vehemently that... No! No! Any conversation or interchange is better than none at all, to trust him on this, that the worst kind of gut-wrenching intergenerational interface is better than withdrawal or hiddenness on either side.”

— David Foster Wallace

455. “Disappear inside the game: break through limits: transcend: improve: win.”

— David Foster Wallace

456. “The big thing that makes Dostoevsky invaluable for American readers and writers is that he appears to possess degrees of passion, conviction, and engagement with deep moral issues that we-here, today-cannot or do not permit ourselves.”

— David Foster Wallace

457. “Aren’t there parts of ourselves that are just better left unfed?”

— David Foster Wallace

458. “Hence also the weird viewer complicity behind TV’s sham “breakthrough programs”: Joe Briefcase needs that PR-patina of “freshness” and “outrageousness” to quiet his conscience while he goes about getting from television what we’ve all been trained to want from it: some strangely American, profoundly shallow, and eternally temporary reassurance.”

— David Foster Wallace

459. “The examiners call their children their little Line 40s. That’s of course where you enter your CCDC from Form 2441 on the 1040. Some of the children were playing Collections. Near the horseshoe courts. Some of the older children. Liens on the toys, a jeopardy assessment and seizure of some of the smaller childrens’ plates; there was some of the usual crying.”

— David Foster Wallace

460. “By all means don’t THINK about the validity of what they’re claiming your life hinges on. Oh do not ask what IS it. Do not ask not whether it’s not insane. Simply open wide for the spoon.”

— David Foster Wallace

461. “It’s always the same sort of grim windy Northeast November day where if you were at home you’d be eating earth-tone soups in a warm kitchen, listening to the wind and glad of home and hearth.”

— David Foster Wallace

462. “That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt.”

— David Foster Wallace

463. “If you close your eyes on a busy urban sidewalk the sound of everybody’s different footwear’s footsteps all put together sounds like something getting chewed by something huge and tireless and patient.”

— David Foster Wallace

464. “You know those mass-market cartridges, for the masses? The ones that are so bad they’re somehow perversely good? This was worse than that.”

— David Foster Wallace

465. “You just never quite occurred out there, kid.”

— David Foster Wallace

466. “The happy pleasure of the person alone, yes?”

— David Foster Wallace

467. “The mother at thirty with face commencing to display the faint seams of the plan for the second face life had in store for her and which she feared would be her own mother’s.”

— David Foster Wallace

468. “I had to face: I had chosen. My choice, this was love. I had chosen I think the way out of the chains of the cage. I needed this woman. Without her to choose over myself, there was only pain and not choosing, rolling drunkenly and making fantasies of death.”

— David Foster Wallace

469. “One of the great Greek contributions to the very concept of mathematics was the conscious recognition and emphasis of the fact that mathematical entities are abstractions, ideas entertained by the mind and sharply distinguished from physical objects or pictures.”

— David Foster Wallace

470. “I think the world divides neatly into those who are excited by the managed induction of terror and those who are not. I do not find terror exciting. I find it terrifying.”

— David Foster Wallace

471. “That everybody’s sneeze sounds different.”

— David Foster Wallace

472. “Her expression is from Page 18 of the Victoria’s Secret catalogue.”

— David Foster Wallace

473. “The inactive viewer’s screen is the color of way out over the Atlantic looking straight down on a cold day.”

— David Foster Wallace

474. “The sky is low and gray and loose and seems to hang. There’s something baggy about the sky.”

— David Foster Wallace

475. “Basically what you’re doing when you’re writing fiction is telling a lie, he tells those of us in the seminar; and the psychology of reading dictates that we’re willing to buy only what coheres, on some gut level, with what we already believe.”

— David Foster Wallace

476. “There’s something elementally horrific about waking before dawn.”

— David Foster Wallace

477. “Dostoevski informs everybody; or he ought to.”

— David Foster Wallace

478. “Help,” the working Account Representative called, feeling the stir of a tinily remembered humid wind and pausing, again, to look behind him, past the Brougham’s black hood and the carelessly dropped safety helmet beside the white cycle, at the Ramp that spiraled up and out of sight toward a street, empty and bright, before the Building, empty and bright, dispossessed, autonomous and autonomic. Bent to what two lives required, below everything, he called for help again and again.”

— David Foster Wallace

479. “He was trying to pay close attention to his surroundings as a way to avert thought and anxiety.”

— David Foster Wallace

480. “An alcohol hangover was definitely no frolic in the psychic glade, all thirsty and sick and your eyes bulging and receding with your pulse, but after a night of involved hallucinogens Hal said the dawn seemed to confer on his psyche a kind of pale sweet aura, a luminescence. Halation, Axford observed.”

— David Foster Wallace

481. “Every two or three generations the world gets vastly different, and the context in which you have to learn how to be a human being, or to have good relationships, or decide whether or not there is a God, or decide whether there’s such a thing as love, and whether it’s redemptive, become vastly different. And the structures with which you can communicate those dilemmas, or have characters struggle with them, seem to become appropriate and then inappropriate again and so on.”

— David Foster Wallace

482. “No horror on earth or elsewhere could equal watching your own offspring open his mouth and have nothing come out.”

— David Foster Wallace

483. “Let’s not sit around and give each other hand-jobs.”

— David Foster Wallace

484. “Himself had apparently thought the stilted, wooden quality of nonprofessionals helped to strip away the pernicious illusion of realism and to remind the audience that they were in reality watching actors acting and not people behaving.”

— David Foster Wallace

485. “Babies are famous to themselves.”

— David Foster Wallace

486. “Cornell University Press announced plans for a festschrift.”

— David Foster Wallace

487. “That distinctive singular stamp of himself is one of the main reasons readers come to love an author. The way you can just tell, often within a couple paragraphs, that something is by Dickens, or Chekhov, or Woolf, or Salinger, or Coetzee, or Ozick. The quality’s almost impossible to describe or account for straight out – it mostly presents as a vibe, a kind of perfume of sensibility – and critics’ attempts to reduce it to questions of “style” are almost universally lame.”

— David Foster Wallace

488. “Some days you can almost see Hal like flit in and out of a match, like some part of him leaves and hovers and then comes back.”

— David Foster Wallace

489. “I tend to think of fiction as being mainly about characters and human beings and inner experience, whereas essays can be much more expository and didactic and more about subjects or ideas.”

— David Foster Wallace

490. “It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most “familiarity” is meditated and delusive.”

— David Foster Wallace

491. “The real, many-veiled answer to the question of just what goes through a great player’s mind as he stands at the center of hostile crowd-noise and lines up the free-throw that will decide the game might well be: nothing at all.”

— David Foster Wallace

492. “His parents’ pregnancies must have been all-out chromosomatic war.”

— David Foster Wallace

493. “It’s a tradition: The Stick. Something so much an extension of you deserves a sobriquet.”

— David Foster Wallace

494. “It’s the digitals. Leith has that word he uses for the shift from analogs to digitals. That word he uses about eleven times an hour.”

— David Foster Wallace

495. “She wanted only tall smooth bottles whose labels spoke of Proof.”

— David Foster Wallace

496. “Americans seemed no longer united so much by common beliefs as by common images: what binds us became what we stand witness to.”

— David Foster Wallace

497. “Hal wills himself to stay objective and not form any judgments before he has serious data, hoping desperately for some sort of hopeful feeling to emerge.”

— David Foster Wallace

498. “The weird thing is that I cared about him at the same time I found him gross. He grossed me out... And that I was so deep in my problem that I couldn’t accept real, genuine, nonsexual or nonromantic or non-prettiness-type interest in me even if it was offered to me.”

— David Foster Wallace

499. “So while a thing in a finite time cannot come in contact with things quantitatively infinite, it can come in contact with things infinite in respect of divisibility: for in this sense the time itself is also infinite.”

— David Foster Wallace

500. “John Ziegler is not a journalist-he is an entertainer. Or maybe it’s better to say that he is part of a peculiar, modern, and very popular type of news industry, one that manages to enjoy authority and influence of journalism without the stodgy constraints of fairness, objectivity, and responsibility that make trying to tell the truth such a drag for everyone involved. It is a frightening industry, though not for any of the simple reasons most critics give.”

— David Foster Wallace