Top 500 David Foster Wallace Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “The modern woman’s a mess of contradictions that they lay on themselves that drives them nuts.”

— David Foster Wallace

154. “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

155. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

158. “It is within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars – compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. 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. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.”

— David Foster Wallace

159. “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

160. “An ad that pretends to be art is – at absolute best – like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This.”

— David Foster Wallace

161. “The real secret behind top athletes’ genius, then, may be as esoteric and obvious and dull and profound as silence itself. 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 a hostile crowdnoise and lines up the free-throw that will decide the game might well be: nothing at all.”

— David Foster Wallace

162. “Look down your shirt and spell attic.”

— David Foster Wallace

163. “The sound of wind had become, for me, silence. When it went away, I was left with the squeak of the blood in my head and the aural glitter of all those little eardrum hairs quivering like a drunk in withdrawal.”

— David Foster Wallace

164. “I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies.”

— David Foster Wallace

165. “Keep in mind that a language is both a map of the world and its own world, with its own shadowlands and crevasses – places where statements that seem to obey all the language’s rules are nevertheless impossible to deal with.”

— David Foster Wallace

166. “It may well be that we, spectators, who are not divinely gifted as athletes, are the only ones able truly to see, articulate, and animate the experience of the gift we are denied. And that those who receive and act out the gift of athletic genius must, perforce, be blind and dumb about it – and not because blindness and dumbness are the price of the gift, but because they are its essence.”

— David Foster Wallace

167. “There’s been time this whole time. You can’t kill time with your heart. Everything takes time.”

— David Foster Wallace

168. “Something they seem to omit to mention in Boston AA when you’re new and out of your skull with desperation and ready to eliminate your map and they tell you how it’ll all get better and better as you abstain and recover: they somehow omit to mention that the way it gets better and you get better is through pain. Not around pain, or in spite of it.”

— David Foster Wallace

169. “It’s all very confusing. I think I’m very honest and candid, but I’m also proud of how honest and candid I am – so where does that put me?”

— David Foster Wallace

170. “The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, ‘then’ what do we do?”

— David Foster Wallace

171. “We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately – the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person.”

— David Foster Wallace

172. “This is how to play with personal integrity in a tournament’s early rounds, when there is no umpire. Any ball that lands on your side and is too close to call: call it fair. Here is how to be invulnerable to gamesmanship. To keep your attention’s aperture tight. Here is how to teach yourself, when an opponent maybe cheats on the line-calls, to remind yourself that what goes around comes around. That a poor sport’s punishment is always self-inflicted. Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.”

— David Foster Wallace

173. “They’re probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us here, but the fact is that religious dogmatists’ problem is exactly the same as the story’s atheist’s – arrogance, blind certainty, a closed-mindedness that’s like an imprisonment so complete that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up.”

— David Foster Wallace

174. “We are the Few, the Proud, the More or Less Constantly Appalled at Everyone Else.”

— David Foster Wallace

175. “She was the kind of fatally pretty and nubile wraithlike figure who glides through the sweaty junior-high corridors of every nocturnal emitter’s dreamscape.”

— David Foster Wallace

176. “Imagine the day after the Berlin Wall came down if everybody in East Germany was plump and comfortable-looking and dressed in Caribbean pastels, and you’ll have a pretty good idea what the Fort Lauderdale Airport terminal looks like today.”

— David Foster Wallace

177. “This argument is not the barrel of drugged trout that Methodological Descriptivism was, but it’s still vulnerable to objections.”

— David Foster Wallace

178. “Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care. What you wish to sing of as tragic love is an attachment not carefully chosen. Die for one person? This is a craziness. Persons change, leave, die, become ill. They leave, lie, go mad, have sickness, betray you, die. Your nation outlives you. A cause outlives you.”

— David Foster Wallace

179. “Do not underestimate objects, he advises Stice. Do not leave objects out of account. The world, after all, which is radically old, is made up of mostly objects.”

— David Foster Wallace

180. “As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.”

— David Foster Wallace

181. “What fire dies when you feed it?”

— David Foster Wallace

182. “Le graduatorie servono a farvi capire a che punto siete, non chi siete. Memorizzate il vostro piazzamento mensile, poi dimenticatelo.”

— David Foster Wallace

183. “Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn’t enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they’re not even very good.”

— David Foster Wallace

184. “Don’t worry about getting in touch with your feelings, they’ll get in touch with you.”

— David Foster Wallace

185. “One of his troubles with his Moms is the fact that Avril Incandenza believes she knows him inside and out as a human being, and an internally worthy one at that, when in fact inside Hal there’s pretty much nothing at all, he knows. His Moms Avril hears her own echoes inside him and thinks what she hears is him, and this makes Hal feel the one thing he feels to the limit, lately: he is lonely. It’s.”

— David Foster Wallace

186. “God, what a ghastly enterprise to be in, though-and what an odd way to achieve success. I’m an exhibitionist who wants to hide, but is unsuccessful at hiding; therefore, somehow I succeed.”

— David Foster Wallace

187. “Francophones are never impressed that anyone else can speak French.”

— David Foster Wallace

188. “At root, vulgar just means popular on a mass scale. It is the semantic opposite of pretentious or snobby. It is humility with a comb-over. It is Nielsen ratings and Barnum’s axiom and the real bottom line. It is big, big business.”

— David Foster Wallace

189. “It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again.”

— David Foster Wallace

190. “If you worship power, you will feel weak and afraid, needing ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay.”

— David Foster Wallace

191. “Chutes and Ladders was perhaps the most sadistic board game ever invented. Adults loathed the game; children loved it. The universe thus dictated that an adult invariably got snookered into playing the game with a child.”

— David Foster Wallace

192. “For these cultures, getting rid of the pain without addressing the deeper cause would be like shutting off a fire alarm while the fire’s still going.”

— David Foster Wallace

193. “I cannot say what color Lenore Beadsman’s eyes are; I cannot look at them; they are the sun to me.”

— David Foster Wallace

194. “And here’s a cliche’ that’s earned its status as a cliche’: whether you’re free or locked up depends, all and only, on what you want. What you have matters about as much as the color of your sky. Or your bars.”

— David Foster Wallace

195. “Ideally, each piece of art’s its own unique object, and its evaluation’s always present-tense.”

— David Foster Wallace

196. “Two clocks, two ghosts, one square acre of hidden mirror.”

— David Foster Wallace

197. “God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I’m not crazy about.”

— David Foster Wallace

198. “For those who’ve never experienced a sunrise in the rural midwest, it’s roughly as soft and romantic as someone’s abruptly hitting the lights in a dark room.”

— David Foster Wallace

199. “The library, and step on it!”

— David Foster Wallace

200. “This is so American, man: either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it.”

— David Foster Wallace