Top 500 David Foster Wallace Quotes (2023 Update)
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101. “If you’ve never wept and want to, have a child.”

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

103. “Say the whole point of love is to try to get your fingers through the holes in the lover’s mask. To get some kind of hold on the mask, and who cares how you do it.”

— David Foster Wallace

104. “The man who knows his limitations, has none.”

— David Foster Wallace

105. “That there might not be angels, but there are people who might as well be angels.”

— David Foster Wallace

106. “The greatest sin is appearing naive or old-fashioned so that somebody can give you a sort of a very cool arch smile and devastate you with one extraordinarily crafted line that puts kind of a hole in your pretentious balloon.”

— David Foster Wallace

107. “The integrity of my sleep has been forever compromised, sir.”

— David Foster Wallace

108. “If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important-if you want to operate on your default-setting-then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren’t pointless and annoying.”

— David Foster Wallace

109. “I think it’s easy to stop smoking; it’s just hard not to commit a felony after you stop.”

— David Foster Wallace

110. “For me, boviscopophobia is an even stronger motive than semi-agoraphobia for staying on the ship when we’re in port.”

— David Foster Wallace

111. “It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames.”

— David Foster Wallace

112. “There’s a weird kind of paradox that the more expensive the vacation is, the more potentially anxiety-producing it is.”

— David Foster Wallace

113. “TV’s “real” agenda is to be “liked,” because if you like what you’re seeing, you’ll stay tuned. TV is completely unabashed about this; it’s its sole raison.”

— David Foster Wallace

114. “It takes a big man to laugh at himself, but it takes an even bigger man to laugh at that man.”

— David Foster Wallace

115. “You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice.”

— David Foster Wallace

116. “I believe I want adult sanity, which seems to me the only unalloyed form of heroism available today.”

— David Foster Wallace

117. “Some words have to be explicitly uttered, Lenore. Only by actually uttering certain words does one really DO what one SAYS. ‘Love’ is one of those words, performative words. Some words can literally make things real.”

— David Foster Wallace

118. “The entire ball game, in terms of both the exam and life, was what you gave attention to vs. what you willed yourself to not.”

— David Foster Wallace

119. “It’s probably hard to feel any sort of Romantic spiritual connection to nature when you have to make your living from it.”

— David Foster Wallace

120. “To be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I’m scared about how sappy this’ll look in print, saying this.”

— David Foster Wallace

121. “Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.”

— David Foster Wallace

122. “Worship your body, beauty, and sexual allure and you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.”

— David Foster Wallace

123. “Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody’s ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.”

— David Foster Wallace

124. “I’m not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions. Some of them are interesting. I could, if you’d let me, talk and talk. Let’s talk about anything. I.”

— David Foster Wallace

125. “That evil people never believe they are evil, but rather that everyone else is evil.”

— David Foster Wallace

126. “My chest bumps like a dryer with shoes in it.”

— David Foster Wallace

127. “Capital T-truth is about life before death.”

— David Foster Wallace

128. “The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.”

— David Foster Wallace

129. “Irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing.”

— David Foster Wallace

130. “America, as everybody knows, is a country of many contradictions, and a big contradiction for a long time has been between a very aggressive form of capitalism and consumerism against what might be called a kind of moral or civic impulse.”

— David Foster Wallace

131. “If two people get married in West Virginia and then pull up stakes and move to Massachusetts and then if they decide they want to get a divorce, what’s the biggest problem getting a divorce?”

— David Foster Wallace

132. “Many people in America throw the term “fascism” around, particularly for Middle-Eastern terrorists, but in fact what fascism really is is a close alliance between a unitary executive and a state and large corporations and a state.”

— David Foster Wallace

133. “I’m screaming for help and everybody’s acting as if I’m singing Ethel Merman covers...”

— David Foster Wallace

134. “Learning how to think” really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.”

— David Foster Wallace

135. “They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier.”

— David Foster Wallace

136. “Our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.”

— David Foster Wallace

137. “I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it.”

— David Foster Wallace

138. “Because all these people have, you see, by this time already killed themselves, where it really counts. By the time these people swallow entire medicine cabinets or take naps in the garage or whatever, they’ve already been killing themselves for ever so long. When they ‘commit suicide’, they’re just being orderly.”

— David Foster Wallace

139. “The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation.”

— David Foster Wallace

140. “I’d like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time, instead of having to go back in my head and enjoy them.”

— David Foster Wallace

141. “There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration.”

— David Foster Wallace

142. “She had a brainy girls discomfort about her own beauty and its effects on folks.”

— David Foster Wallace

143. “My worst character flaw that I’m conscious of is that I tend to think my way into circles instead of resolving anything. It’s paralyzing and boring for people around me.”

— David Foster Wallace

144. “The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. States as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude – but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense.”

— David Foster Wallace

145. “Would that we scrutinized our technology the way we do our people.”

— David Foster Wallace

146. “And then but so what’s the difference between tennis and suicide, life and death, the game and its own end?”

— David Foster Wallace

147. “Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?”

— David Foster Wallace

148. “David Cronenberg’s mainstream Crash comes out of absolutely nowhere to win something called Best Alternative Adult Feature Film.”

— David Foster Wallace

149. “But if I decide to decide there’s a different, less selfish, less lonely point to my life, won’t the reason for this decision be my desire to be less lonely, meaning to suffer less overall pain? Can the decision to be less selfish ever be anything other than a selfish decision?”

— David Foster Wallace

150. “He knew what the Beats know and what the great tennis player knows, son: learn to do nothing, with your whole head and body, and everything will be done by what’s around you.”

— David Foster Wallace