Top 500 David Foster Wallace Quotes (2024 Update)
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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 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

303. “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

304. “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

305. “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

306. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

308. “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

309. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

311. “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

312. “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

313. “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

314. “Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes.”

— David Foster Wallace

315. “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

316. “That as people age, accumulate more and more private experiences, their sense of history tightens, narrows, becomes more personal? So that to the extent that they remember events of social importance, they remember only for example ‘where they were’ when such-and-such occurred. Et cetera et cetera. Objective events and data become naturally more and more subjectively colored.”

— David Foster Wallace

317. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

319. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

321. “The father of Ruth van Cleve’s child, she reports, is under the protection and care of the Norfolk County Correctional Authority, awaiting sentencing for what Ruth van Cleve describes several times as operating a pharmaceutical company without a license.”

— David Foster Wallace

322. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

324. “People who’re somehow burned at birth, withered or ablated way past anything like what might be fair, they either curl up in their fire, or else they rise.”

— David Foster Wallace

325. “Also essential to math is the sense in which abstracting something can mean reducing it to its absolute skeletal essence, as in the abstract of an article or book. As such, it can mean thinking hard about things that for the most part people can’t think hard about-because it drives them crazy.”

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

327. “It would take an architect who could hate enough to feel enough to love enough to perpetrate the kind of special cruelty only real lovers can inflict.”

— David Foster Wallace

328. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

332. “Well it totally freaks them out, what do you think? And I just about die of the embarrassment. I don’t ever know what to say. What do you say if you just shouted “Victory for the Forces of Democratic Freedom!” right when you came?”

— David Foster Wallace

333. “There are secrets within secrets, though – always.”

— David Foster Wallace

334. “Look for a candidate who can do to the electorate what corporations are learning to do, so Government – or, better, Big Government, Big Brother, Intrusive Government – becomes the image against which this candidate defines himself. Though.”

— David Foster Wallace

335. “You’d be doing us both a favor.’ ‘This drives me bats. You know this drives me bats.’ Orin and Hal’s term for this routine is Politeness Roulette. This Moms-thing that makes you hate yourself for telling her the truth about any kind of problem because of what the consequences will be for her. It’s like to report any sort of need or problem is to mug her.”

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

337. “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

338. “Cantor’s discovery that lines, planes, cubes, and polytopes were all equivalent as sets of points goes a long way toward explaining why set theory was such a revolutionary development for math-revolutionary in theory and practice both.”

— David Foster Wallace

339. “Our attachments are our temple, what we worship, no? What we give ourselves to, what we invest with faith.”

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

341. “But what of Lenore, of Lenore’s hair? Here is hair that is clearly within and of itself every color – blond and red and jet-black-blue and honeynut – but which effects an outward optical compromise with possibility that consists of appearing simply dull brown, save for brief teasing glimpses out of the corner of one’s eye.”

— David Foster Wallace

342. “What if there was something essentially wrong with Claude Sylvanshine that wasn’t wrong with other people? What if he was simple ill-suited, the way some people are born without limbs or certain organs? 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

343. “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

344. “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

345. “The conjoined dogs were too distant to ascertain whether they had collars or tags, yet close enough that I could make out the expression on the face of the dominant dog above. It was blank and at the same time fervid – the same general expression as on a human being’s face when he is doing something that he feels compulsively driven to do and yet does not understand just why he wants to do it.”

— 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. “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... That they walk among us. Teach our children. Inscrutable. Brass-faced.”

— David Foster Wallace

348. “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

349. “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

350. “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