Top 500 David Foster Wallace Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 7 of 10

301. “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

302. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

304. “It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art.”

— David Foster Wallace

305. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

309. “Certain sincerely devout and spiritually advanced people believe that the God of their understanding helps them find parking places and gives them advice on Mass. Lottery numbers.”

— David Foster Wallace

310. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

312. “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

313. “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

314. “I felt, as I became a later and later bloomer, alienated not just from my own recalcitrant glabrous little body but in a way from the whole elemental exterior I’d come to see as my co-conspirator.”

— David Foster Wallace

315. “I acknowledge that I could never convey just what was so dreadful about this tableau of a bright, utterly silent room full of men immersed in work. It was the type of nightmare whose terror is less about what you see than about the feeling you have in your chest and stomach about what you’re seeing.”

— David Foster Wallace

316. “I am coming to see that the sensation of the worst nightmares, a sensation that can be felt asleep or awake, is identical to those worst dreams’ form itself: the sudden intra-dream realization that the nightmares’ very essence and center has been with you all along, even awake: it’s just been... overlooked; and then that horrific interval between realizing what you’ve overlooked and turning your head to look back at what’s been right there all along, the whole time...”

— David Foster Wallace

317. “The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I’ll hush.”

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

319. “The next year had seen them drop into the crazy-obsessive love spiral in which they’d break up and then not be able to stay away from each other, until one time she was able to stay away, and that was all she wrote.”

— David Foster Wallace

320. “You have a great deal of yourself on the line, writing- your vanity is at stake. You discover a tricky thing about fiction writing; a certain amount of vanity is necessary to be able to do it all, but any vanity above that certain amount is lethal.”

— David Foster Wallace

Featured in: Fun Quotes

321. “This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.”

— David Foster Wallace

322. “Certain things not only can’t be taught but can be retarded by other stuff that can be taught.”

— David Foster Wallace

323. “I Philo, educating yourself was something you had to do in spite if school, not because of it – which is basically why so many of my high school peers are still there in Philo even now, selling one another insurance, drinking supermarket liquor, watching television, awaiting the formality of their first cardiac.”

— David Foster Wallace

324. “I begin to feel as though my thoughts and voice here are in some way the creative products of something outside me, not in my control, and yet that this shaping, determining influence outside me is still me. I feel a division which the outside voice posits as the labor pains of a nascent emotional conscience.”

— David Foster Wallace

325. “Lucien finally dies, rather a while after he’s quit shuddering like a clubbed muskie and seemed to them to die, as he finally sheds his body’s suit, Lucien finds his gut and throat again and newly whole, clean and unimpeded, and is free, catapulted over fans and the Convexity’s glass palisades at desperate speeds, soaring north, sounding a bell-clear and nearly maternal alarmed call-to-arms in all the world’s well-known tongues.”

— David Foster Wallace

326. “Does somebody have an explanation why there’s human flesh on the hall window upstairs?”

— David Foster Wallace

327. “I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art.”

— David Foster Wallace

328. “It’ll help your attitude to look for evidence of design.”

— David Foster Wallace

329. “In life, the microphone passes your lips but once... you had better be ready to sing.”

— David Foster Wallace

330. “Trying to be anti-cool is just one exponent off trying to be cool – it’s the same beast.”

— David Foster Wallace

331. “Another way fathers impact sons is that sons, once their voices have changed in puberty, invariably answer the telephone with the same locutions and intonations as their fathers. This holds true regardless of whether the fathers are still alive.”

— David Foster Wallace

332. “When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces. The man who’d introduced them didn’t much like either of them, though he acted as if he did, anxious as he was to preserve good relations at all times. One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one.”

— David Foster Wallace

333. “One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for.”

— David Foster Wallace

334. “People, unless they’re paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority.”

— David Foster Wallace

335. “Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans.”

— David Foster Wallace

336. “Two dry mouths bumping at each other, trying to kiss, his self-conscious thoughts twisting around on themselves like a snake on a stick while he bucked and snorted dryly above her, his swollen eyes red and his face sagging so that its slack folds maybe touched, limply, the folds of her own loose sagging face as it sloshed back and forth on his pillow, its mouth working dryly. The thought was repellent.”

— David Foster Wallace

337. “Do this: hate him for me after I die. I beg you. Dying request.”

— David Foster Wallace

338. “It may, after all, be alright to do something scary without thinking, but not when the scariness is the not thinking itself.”

— David Foster Wallace

339. “The only way you can communicate at a high level is to be conscious of everything you write – every comma, every pronoun, every word, and all their implications.”

— David Foster Wallace

340. “By week’s end, when we’d had all manner of weather, I finally saw what it was about heavy seas and marvelous rest: in heavy seas you feel rocked to sleep, with the windows’ spume a gentle shushing, the engines’ throb a mother’s pulse.”

— David Foster Wallace

341. “The neurology of failure. What if he was simply born and destined to live in the shadow of Total Fear and Despair, and all his so-called activities were pathetic attempts to distract him from the inevitable?”

— David Foster Wallace

342. “My father’s mood surrounded him like a field and affected any room he occupied, like an odor or a certain cast to the light.”

— David Foster Wallace

343. “I felt the sort of soaring, ceilingless tedium that transcends tedium and becomes worry.”

— David Foster Wallace

344. “He has that rare spinal appreciation for beauty in the ordinary that nature seems to bestow on those who have no native words for what they see.”

— David Foster Wallace

345. “To presume that dictionary-making can somehow avoid or transcend ideology is simply to subscribe to a particular ideology, one that might aptly be called Unbelievably Naive Positivism.”

— David Foster Wallace

346. “There was the matter of the withered-looking and bradyauxetic arms, which just as in a hair-raising case of Volkmann’s contracture 115 curled out in front of his thorax in magiscule S’s and were usable for rudimentary knifeless eating and slapping at doorknobs until they sort of turned just enough and doors could be kicked open and.”

— David Foster Wallace

347. “Don’t ask why if you don’t want to die. Do as you’re told if you want to get old.”

— David Foster Wallace

348. “Hell hath no fury like a coolly received postmodernist.”

— David Foster Wallace

349. “The Great White Male is rap’s Grand Inquisitor, its idiot questioner, its Alien Other no less than Reds were for McCarthy.”

— David Foster Wallace

350. “My bones are ringing the way sometimes people say their ears are ringing, I’m so tired.”

— David Foster Wallace