Top 500 David Foster Wallace Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “This appetite to choose death by pleasure if it is available to choose – this appetite of your people unable to choose appetites, this is the death.”

— David Foster Wallace

253. “We may say, roughly, that a mathematical idea is ‘significant’ if it can be connected, in a natural and illuminating way, with a large complex of other mathematical ideas. Thus a serious mathematical theorem, a theorem which connects significant ideas, is likely to lead to important advances in mathematics itself and even in other sciences.”

— David Foster Wallace

254. “Good literature makes your head throb heartlike.”

— David Foster Wallace

255. “It was impossible. It was like something out of The Matrix. I don’t know what-all sounds were involved, but my spouse says she hurried in and there was popcorn all over the couch and I was down on one knee and my eyeballs looked like novelty-shop eyeballs.”

— David Foster Wallace

256. “These worst mornings with cold floors and hot windows and merciless light – the soul’s certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheet.”

— David Foster Wallace

257. “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

258. “So which is the lie? Hard or soft? Silence or time?”

— David Foster Wallace

259. “Knowing that internal stress could cause failure on the exam merely set up internal stress about the prospect of internal stress.”

— David Foster Wallace

260. “There’s a kind of Ah-ha! Somebody at least for a moment feels about something or sees something the way that I do. It doesn’t happen all the time. It’s these brief flashes or flames, but I get that sometimes. I feel unalone – intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I’m in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry in a way that I don’t with other art.”

— David Foster Wallace

261. “This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows it’s about something else, way down.”

— David Foster Wallace

262. “She smelled of talcum powder and Big Red.”

— David Foster Wallace

263. “Julie has told Faye that she believes lovers go through three different stages in getting really to know one another. First they exchange anecdotes and inclinations. Then each tells the other what she believes. Then each observes the relation between what the other says she believes and what she in fact does.”

— David Foster Wallace

264. “All on a real superficial-type level, since Watson’s basically got like a little liquid-filled nubbin at the top of his spine where his brain ought to be.”

— David Foster Wallace

265. “That what appears to be egoism so often isn’t.”

— David Foster Wallace

266. “Life is essentially one long search for an ashtray.”

— David Foster Wallace

267. “I think at seventeen now I believe the only real monsters might be the type of liar where there’s simply no way to tell. The ones who give nothing away.’ ‘But then how do you know they’re monsters, then?’ ‘That’s the monstrosity right there, Boo, I’m starting to think.’ ‘Golly Ned.’ ‘That they walk among us. Teach our children. Inscrutable. Brass-faced.”

— David Foster Wallace

268. “We’re a family that takes its home entertainment very seriously.”

— David Foster Wallace

269. “He said she went around with her feelings out in front of her with an arm around the feelings’ windpipe and a Glock 9mm. to the feelings’ temple like a terrorist with a hostage, daring you to shoot.”

— David Foster Wallace

270. “She had gone to the state fair in Columbus once with her sister Clarice and they had gotten lost in the House of Mirrors and Clarice’s purse had been stolen by a man who had pretended to be a reflection until the very last moment.”

— David Foster Wallace

271. “Believe what you want. I’m powerless over what you believe.”

— David Foster Wallace

272. “Untitled. Unfinished. UNRELEASED.”

— David Foster Wallace

273. “I wonder if anyone feels as though they’re the same person they seem to remember. It would make them have a nervous breakdown. It probably wouldn’t even make sense. I don’t know if this is enough. I don’t know what anybody else has told you.”

— David Foster Wallace

274. “A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane.”

— David Foster Wallace

275. “The individual’s right to pursue his own vision of the best ration of pleasure to pain: utterly sacrosanct.”

— David Foster Wallace

276. “Unless he actually had a lit gasper going, Calvin Thrust always has this way of being only technically wherever he was. There was always this air of imminent departure about him, like a man whose beeper was about to sound. It’s like a lit gasper was psychic ballast for him or something. Everything he said to Gately seemed like it was going to be the last thing he said right before he looked at his watch and slapped his forehead and left.”

— David Foster Wallace

277. “He didn’t reject the idea so much as not react to it and watch as it floated away. He thought very broadly of desires and ideas being watched but not acted upon, he thought of impulses being starved of expression and dying out and floating dryly away.”

— David Foster Wallace

278. “No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories.”

— David Foster Wallace

279. “You have decided being scared is caused mostly by thinking.”

— David Foster Wallace

280. “With words and tears she has amputated something form me. I gave her the intimate importance of me, and her bus pulled away, leaving something key of mine inside her like the weapon of a bee. All I want to do now is drive very away, to bleed.”

— David Foster Wallace

281. “I was always either so unreasonably and pointlessly happy that no one place could seem to contain me, or so melancholy, so sick and silly with sadness that there was no place I could stomach the thought of entering. I hated it here. And I have never been as happy as when I was here. And these two things together confront me with the beak and claws of the True.”

— David Foster Wallace

282. “Sounds kind of ad hoc and jerry-rigged and haphazard.’ ‘Everybody’s a critic. This wasn’t an aesthetic endeavor.”

— David Foster Wallace

283. “It’s one of those unpleasant opioid feverish half-sleep states, more a fugue-state than a sleep-state, less a floating than like being cast adrift on rough seas, tossed mightily in and out of this half-sleep where your mind’s still working and you can ask yourself whether you’re asleep even as you dream. And any dreams you do have seem ragged at the edges, gnawed on, incomplete.”

— David Foster Wallace

284. “It is unimaginably hard to do this – to live consciously, adultly, day in and day out.”

— David Foster Wallace

285. “Someone has farted; no one knows just who, but this isn’t like a normal adult place where everybody coolly pretends a fart didn’t happen; here everybody has to make their little comment.”

— David Foster Wallace

286. “I’ve already just completely opened up about my shame and my inability to be open and straightforward about this. You’re exposing something I’ve already held up to view. It’s your shame about being ashamed of what you’re afraid might be seen as a lack of brightness that’s getting to stay buried under this dead horse of my deformity that you’re trying to whip.”

— David Foster Wallace

287. “It occurred to me that the movement of the amputated knob perfectly schematized what it would look like for someone to try to turn somersaults with one hand nailed to the floor. This was how I first became interested in the possibilities of annulation.”

— David Foster Wallace

288. “That a person who did something for somebody’s gratitude was more like a 2-D cutout image of a person than a bona fide person.”

— David Foster Wallace

289. “The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still “are” human beings, now. Or can be.”

— David Foster Wallace

290. “He’d cure himself by excess.”

— David Foster Wallace

291. “It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed... If a person in physical pain has a hard time attending to anything except that pain, a clinically depressed person cannot even perceive any other person or thing as independent of the universal pain that is digesting her cell by cell.”

— David Foster Wallace

292. “And yet this nauseated feeling has come and gone for you in the past, it’s passed eventually during prior depressions, Katherine, has it not?’ ‘But when you’re in the feeling you forget. The feeling feels like it’s always been there and will always be there, and you forget. It’s like this whole filter drops down over the whole way you think about everything, a couple weeks after –.”

— David Foster Wallace

293. “I have pointed rhythmically at the ceiling to the two-four beat of the same disco music I hated pointing at the ceiling to in 1977.”

— David Foster Wallace

294. “We will, of course, without hesitation use art to parody, ridicule, debunk, or criticize ideologies.”

— David Foster Wallace

295. “I knew my limitations and the limitations of the courts I played on, and adjusted thusly. I was at my best in bad conditions.”

— David Foster Wallace

296. “Our leaders, our government is us, all of us, so if they’re venal and weak it’s because we are.”

— David Foster Wallace

297. “Ortho Stice played with a kind of rigid, liquid grace, like a panther in a back-brace.”

— David Foster Wallace

298. “I find in myself a need to get very away.”

— David Foster Wallace

299. “In a nation whose great informing myth is that it has no great informing myth, familiarity equaled timelessness.”

— David Foster Wallace

300. “Le persone bruciate alla nascita, quelle colpite e offese oltre ogni giustizia, finiscono per ripiegarsi nel loro stesso fuoco, o per risorgere.”

— David Foster Wallace