Top 500 David Foster Wallace Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

256. “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

257. “I have felt as bleak as I’ve felt since puberty, and have filled almost three Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me.”

— David Foster Wallace

258. “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

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. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

262. “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

263. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

277. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

280. “And girl-women, women, curved like instruments or fruit, skin burnished brown-bright, suit tops held by delicate knots of fragile colored string against the pull of mysterious weights, suit bottoms riding low over the gentle juts of hips totally unlike your own, immoderate swells and swivels that melt in light into a surrounding space that cups and accommodates the soft curves as things precious. You almost understand.”

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

282. “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

283. “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

284. “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

285. “He’d cure himself by excess.”

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

287. “Words and a book and a belief that the world is words...”

— David Foster Wallace

Featured in: Book Quotes

288. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

291. “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

292. “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

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. “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

295. “I believe the influence of Kierkegaard on Camus is underestimated. I believe Dennis Gabor may very well have been the Antichrist. I believe Hobbes is just Rousseau in a dark mirror. I believe, with Hegel, that transcendence is absorption.”

— David Foster Wallace

296. “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

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. “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

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