Top 500 David Foster Wallace Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “So which is the lie? Hard or soft? Silence or time?”

— David Foster Wallace

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

257. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

261. “He imagined that the clock’s second hand possessed awareness and knew that it was a second hand and that its job was to around and around inside a circle of numbers forever at the same slow unvarying machinelike rate...”

— David Foster Wallace

262. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

271. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

273. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

275. “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

276. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

279. “For 360 minutes per diem, we receive unconscious reinforcement of the deep thesis that the most significant feature of truly alive persons is watchableness, and that genuine human worth is not just identical with but rooted in the phenomenon of watching.”

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

281. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

284. “Kafka’s evocations are, rather, unconscious and almost sub-archetypal, the little-kid stuff from which myths derive; this is why we tend to call even his weirdest stories nightmarish rather than surreal.”

— David Foster Wallace

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

285. “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

286. “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

287. “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

288. “He’d cure himself by excess.”

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

290. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

292. “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

293. “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

294. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

297. “Like the doctrine of determinism, its better-known metaphysical cousin, fatalism holds that it is not in our power to do anything other than what we actually end up doing.”

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

299. “I will be conveyed to an Emergency Room of some kind, where I will be detained as long as I do not respond to questions, and then, when I do respond to questions, I will be sedated; so it will be an inversion of standard travel, the ambulance and ER: I’ll make the journey first, then depart.”

— David Foster Wallace

300. “Do exactly as you please–if you still trust what seems to please you.”

— David Foster Wallace