Top 500 David Foster Wallace Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 2 of 10

51. “What TV is extremely good at – and realize that this is ‘all it does’ – is discerning what large numbers of people think they want, and supplying it.”

— David Foster Wallace

52. “I don’t think writers are any smarter than other people. I think they may be more compelling in their stupidity, or in their confusion.”

— David Foster Wallace

53. “Nothing brings you together like a common enemy.”

— David Foster Wallace

54. “In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard’s vote.”

— David Foster Wallace

55. “The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates.”

— David Foster Wallace

56. “I had kind of a midlife crisis at twenty which probably doesn’t augur well for my longevity.”

— David Foster Wallace

57. “That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we’re all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine...”

— David Foster Wallace

58. “I have filled 3 Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me.”

— David Foster Wallace

59. “I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader.”

— David Foster Wallace

60. “The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.”

— David Foster Wallace

61. “The point of books is to combat loneliness.”

— David Foster Wallace

62. “The severing of an established connection is exponentially more painful than the rejection of an attempted connection.”

— David Foster Wallace

63. “I’m not afraid of new things. I’m just afraid of feeling alone even when there’s somebody else there. I’m afraid of feeling bad. Maybe that’s selfish, but it’s the way I feel.”

— David Foster Wallace

64. “Life is like tennis. Those who serve best usually win.”

— David Foster Wallace

65. “Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move.”

— David Foster Wallace

66. “Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty.”

— David Foster Wallace

67. “Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself.”

— David Foster Wallace

68. “And when he came to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out.”

— David Foster Wallace

69. “I miss everyone. I can remember being young and feeling a thing and identifying it as homesickness, and then thinking well now that’s odd, isn’t it, because I was home, all the time. What on earth are we to make of that?”

— David Foster Wallace

70. “You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. That is real freedom. That is being educated and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race.”

— David Foster Wallace

71. “Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.”

— David Foster Wallace

72. “The interesting thing is why we’re so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.”

— David Foster Wallace

73. “The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the wall, during the first eight pages.”

— David Foster Wallace

74. “We’re not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader’s own life “outside” the story changes the story.”

— David Foster Wallace

75. “What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love? What if the temple comes to Mohammed? What if you just love? without deciding? You just do: you see her and in that instant are lost to sober account-keeping and cannot choose but to love?”

— David Foster Wallace

76. “Scenery is here. Wish you were beautiful.”

— David Foster Wallace

77. “It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.”

— David Foster Wallace

78. “I love the way you love, but I hate the way I’m supposed to love you back.”

— David Foster Wallace

79. “Almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it.”

— David Foster Wallace

80. “He suddenly felt nothing, or rather Nothing, a pre-tornadic stillness of zero sensation, as if he were the very space he occupied.”

— David Foster Wallace

81. “There are no choices without personal freedom, Buckeroo. It’s not us who are dead inside. These things you find so weak and contemptible in us – these are just the hazards of being free.”

— David Foster Wallace

82. “The assumption that you everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.”

— David Foster Wallace

83. “The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘Oh how banal.’”

— David Foster Wallace

84. “To experience commitment as the loss of options, a type of death, the death of childhood’s limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress-this will happen, mark me. Childhood’s end.”

— David Foster Wallace

85. “Hear this or not, as you will. Learn it now, or later – the world has time. Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui – these are the true hero’s enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real.”

— David Foster Wallace

86. “Not that that mystical stuff’s necessarily true: The only thing that’s capital-T true is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see it.”

— David Foster Wallace

87. “Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever.”

— David Foster Wallace

88. “If Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it.”

— David Foster Wallace

89. “It’s a very American illness, the idea of giving yourself away entirely to the idea of working in order to achieve some sort of brass ring that usually involves people feeling some way about you – I mean, people wonder why we walk around feeling alienated and lonely and stressed out.”

— David Foster Wallace

90. “I perhaps could have been somewhat better. One of the interesting things about playing competitive sports as a child is that you confront your own limitations rather starkly at a certain point.”

— David Foster Wallace

91. “I never, even for a moment, doubted what they’d told me. This is why it is that adults and even parents can, unwittingly, be cruel: they cannot imagine doubt’s complete absence. They have forgotten.”

— David Foster Wallace

92. “No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.”

— David Foster Wallace

93. “American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.”

— David Foster Wallace

94. “It’s in the democratic citizen’s nature to be like a leaf that doesn’t believe in the tree it’s part of.”

— David Foster Wallace

95. “Do not underestimate objects.”

— David Foster Wallace

96. “Most of us will still take nihilism over neanderthalism.”

— David Foster Wallace

97. “In fact, the likeliest reason why so many of us care so little about politics is that modern politicians makes us sad, hurt us deep down in ways that are hard even to name, much less talk about.”

— David Foster Wallace

98. “This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn’t engage anybody.”

— David Foster Wallace

99. “Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable.”

— David Foster Wallace

100. “She took a sort of abject pride in her mecilessness toward herself.”

— David Foster Wallace