Top 500 David Foster Wallace Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “The music’s still going, going absolutely nowhere, like Philip Glass on Quaaludes.”

— David Foster Wallace

202. “That a little-mentioned paradox of Substance addiction is: that once you are sufficiently enslaved by a Substance to need to quit the Substance in order to save your life, the enslaving Substance has become so deeply important to you that you will all but lose your mind when it is taken away from you.”

— David Foster Wallace

203. “These kids should be out drinking beer and seeing films and having panty raids and losing virginities and writhing to suggestive music, not making up long, sad, convoluted stories.”

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

206. “He was around where the tree-line bulged herniatically out toward the end of the West Courts’ fencing.”

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

208. “The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head.”

— David Foster Wallace

209. “A city that pretends to be nothing but what it is, an enormous machine of exchange – of spectacle for money, of sensation for money, of money for more money, of pleasure for whatever be tomorrow’s abstract cost.”

— David Foster Wallace

210. “I think the only thing for me, the tricky thing with the footnotes, is that they are an irritant, and they require a little extra work, and so they either have to be really germane or they have to be kind of fun to read.”

— David Foster Wallace

211. “The sun like a sneaky keyhole view of hell.”

— David Foster Wallace

212. “Irony tyrannizes us. All US irony is based on an implicit ‘I don’t really mean what I’m saying.”

— David Foster Wallace

213. “The sharply precise divisions and boundaries, together with the fact that – wind and your more exotic-type spins aside – balls can be made to travel in straight lines only, make textbook tennis plane geometry. It is billiards with balls that won’t hold still. It is chess on the run. It is to artillery and airstrikes what football is to infantry and attrition.”

— David Foster Wallace

214. “Tell them there are no holes for your fingers in the masks of men. Tell them how could you ever even hope to love what you can’t grab onto.”

— David Foster Wallace

215. “Now a second-order vain person is a vain person who’s also vain about appearing to have an utter lack of vanity. Who’s enormously afraid that other people will perceive him as vain. A second-order vain person will sit up late learning jokes in order to appear funny and charming, but will deny that he sits up late learning jokes. Or he’ll perhaps even try to give the impression that he doesn’t regard himself as funny at all.”

— David Foster Wallace

216. “Worship your intellect, being seing as smart – you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge og being found out. And so on.”

— David Foster Wallace

217. “I had, by thirteen, developed a sort of Taoist hubris about my ability to control via non-control.”

— David Foster Wallace

218. “One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.”

— David Foster Wallace

219. “I’m not saying that television is vulgar and dumb because the people who compose the Audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.”

— David Foster Wallace

220. “Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness, because it’s so socially repulsive, but it’s pretty much the same for all of us deep down. It’s our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: There is no experience you’ve had that you were not at the absolute center of.”

— David Foster Wallace

221. “It’s not that students don’t “get” Kafka’s humor but that we’ve taught them to see humor as something you get-the same way we’ve taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they 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 that horrific struggle.”

— David Foster Wallace

222. “I think, today’s irony ends up saying: “How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.”

— David Foster Wallace

223. “There is about world-class athletes carving out exemptions from physical laws a transcendent beauty that makes manifest God in man.”

— David Foster Wallace

224. “Apeshit has rarely enjoyed so literal a denotation.”

— David Foster Wallace

225. “True heroism is a priori incompatible with audience or applause or even the bare notice of the common run of man. In fact,’ he said, ’the less conventionally heroic or exciting or adverting or even interesting or engaging a labor appears to be, the greater its potential as an arena for actual heroism, and therefore as a denomination of joy unequaled by any you men can yet imagine.”

— David Foster Wallace

226. “My fingers are mated into a mirrored series of what manifests, to me, as the letter X.”

— David Foster Wallace

227. “I read,′ I say. ‘I study and read. I bet I’ve read everything you’ve read. Don’t think I haven’t. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, “The library, and step on it.”

— David Foster Wallace

228. “There are, apparently, persons who are deeply afraid of their own emotions, particularly the painful ones. Grief, regret, sadness. Sadness especially, perhaps. Dolores describes these persons as afraid of obliteration, emotional engulfment. As if something truly and thoroughly felt would have no end or bottom. Would become infinite and engulf them.’ ‘Engulf means obliterate.”

— David Foster Wallace

229. “If you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do it.”

— David Foster Wallace

230. “Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval.”

— David Foster Wallace

231. “I just think that fiction that isn’t exploring what it means to be human today isn’t art.”

— David Foster Wallace

232. “Am I happy? is one of those questions that, if it has got to be asked, more or less dictates its own answer.”

— David Foster Wallace

233. “It’s always seemed a little preposterous that Hamlet, for all his paralyzing doubt about everything, never once doubts the reality of the ghost. Never.”

— David Foster Wallace

234. “One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one.”

— David Foster Wallace

235. “We’re all on each other’s food chain. All of us. It’s an individual sport. Welcome to the meaning of individual. We’re each deeply alone here. It’s what we all have in common, this aloneness.”

— David Foster Wallace

236. “A question, doctor,” he said. “Why doesn’t the coyote take the money he spends on bird costumes and catapults and radioactive road runner food pellets and explosive missiles and simply go eat Chinese?” He smiled coolly. “Why doesn’t the coyote simply go eat Chinese food?”

— David Foster Wallace

237. “This is nourishing, redemptive we become less alone inside.”

— David Foster Wallace

238. “This is what happens: you imagine the things I will say and then say them for me and then become angry with them. Without my mouth; it never opens. You speak to yourself, inventing sides. This itself is the habit of children: lazy, lonely, self.”

— David Foster Wallace

239. “What’s unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. What his head could report to him, looking over and ahead and reporting.”

— David Foster Wallace

240. “And then also, again, still, what are those boundaries, if they’re not baselines, that contain and direct its infinite expansion inward, that make tennis like chess on the run, beautiful and infinitely dense? Schtitt’s.”

— David Foster Wallace

241. “I think the language needs to find new ways to pull the reader. And my personal belief is a lot of it has to do with voice, and a feeling of intimacy between the writer and the reader. That sorta, given the atomization and loneliness of contemporary life – that’s our opening, and that’s’ our gift.”

— David Foster Wallace

242. “Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.”

— David Foster Wallace

243. “It’s like a fugue of evaded responsibility.”

— David Foster Wallace

244. “Golf. A golf man. Is my tone communicating the contempt? Billiards on a big table, Jim. A bodiless game of spasmodic flailing and flying sod. A quote unquote sport. Anal rage and checkered berets.”

— David Foster Wallace

245. “I had four hundred thousand pages of continental philosophy and lit theory in my head. And by God, I was going to use it to prove to him that I was smarter than he was.”

— David Foster Wallace

246. “That you just naturally want what we, your fathers, work night and day to make sure you want? Grow up, for Christ’s sake. Join the world. We produce what makes you want to need to consume. Advertising. Laxatives. HMO’s. Baking soda. Insurance. Your fears are built – and your wishes, on that foundation.”

— David Foster Wallace

247. “Between a cold kitchen window gone opaque with the stove’s wet heat and the breath of us, an open drawer, and the gilt ferrotype of identical boys flanking a blind vested father which hung in a square recession above the wireless’s stand, my Mum stood and cut off my long hair in the uneven heat.”

— David Foster Wallace

248. “To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.”

— David Foster Wallace

249. “Gentlemen- by which I mean, of course, latter adolescents who aspire to manhood gentlemen, here is a truth: Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is. Such endurance is, as it happens, the distillate of what is, today, in this world neither you nor I have made, heroism. Heroism.”

— David Foster Wallace

250. “This is PCE’s core fallacy – that a society’s mode of expression is productive of its attitudes rather than a product of those attitudes 63 – and of course it’s nothing but the obverse of the politically conservative SNOOT’s delusion that social change can be retarded by restricting change in standard usage.”

— David Foster Wallace