Top 500 David Foster Wallace Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

357. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

359. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

361. “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

362. “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

363. “The whole quantum setup ends up being embarrassing in the special way something pretentious is embarrassing when it’s also wrong.”

— David Foster Wallace

364. “Is it showing off if you hate it?”

— David Foster Wallace

365. “I balked at trying antidepressants, I just couldn’t see myself taking pills to try to be less of a fraud.”

— David Foster Wallace

366. “What you do is you hide your deep need to hide, and you do this out of the need to appear to other people as if you have the strength not to care how you appear to others.”

— David Foster Wallace

367. “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

368. “In short, not only was it surprising to be greeted in person with such enthusiastic words, but it was doubly surprising when the person reciting these words displayed the same kind of disengagement as, say, the checkout clerk who utters the words ‘Have a nice day’ while her expression indicates that it’s really a matter of total indifference to her whether you drop dead in the parking lot outside ten seconds from now.”

— David Foster Wallace

369. “Certe cose non solo non possono essere insegnate, ma possono essere ritardate da altre cose che invece possono essere insegnate.”

— David Foster Wallace

370. “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

371. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

373. “By the way, I do think that awareness is different from thinking. I am similar to most other people, I believe, in that I do not really do my most important thinking in large, intentional blocks where I sit down uninterrupted in a chair and know in advance what it is I’m going to think about... It doesn’t work like that for me.”

— David Foster Wallace

374. “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

375. “The desire for perfect release and the real-world impossibility of perfect, whenever-you-want-it release had together produced a tension they could no longer stand.”

— David Foster Wallace

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376. “The Greeks were the real inventors of what we call math, because-again-they were the first people to treat numbers and their relations as abstractions rather than as properties of collections of real things.”

— David Foster Wallace

377. “His eyes were holes in the world.”

— David Foster Wallace

378. “I fully grant that mysterious invisible room-cleaning is in a way great, every true slob’s fantasy, somebody materializing and deslobbing your room and then dematerializing – like having a mom without the guilt.”

— David Foster Wallace

379. “It was when I was the age where you can, as they say, “hear voices” without worrying that something is wrong with you. I “heard voices” all the time as a small child.”

— David Foster Wallace

380. “Something almost too overt about the pathos of the posture: this exact position was illustrated in some melancholic Watteau-era print on the frontispiece to Yevtuschenko’s Field Guide to Clinical States.”

— David Foster Wallace

381. “The way I think about things and experience things is not particularly linear, and it’s not orderly, and it’s not pyramidical, and there are a lot of loops.”

— David Foster Wallace

382. “My own plan for the coming fourteen months is to knock on doors and stuff envelopes. Maybe even to wear a button. To try to accrete with others into a demographically significant mass. To try extra hard to exercise patience, politeness, and imagination on those with whom I disagree. Also to floss more.”

— David Foster Wallace

383. “Soy un turista americano, y por tanto ‘ex officio’ corpulento, rollizo, rubicundo, escandaloso, tosco, condescendiente, ensimismado, malcriado, preocupado por su aspecto, avergonzado, desesperante y codicioso.”

— David Foster Wallace

384. “No, you simply sit there with your arms crossed nodding with that timeless patience that communicates condescension and judgment without exposing you to responsibility for insinuating anything aloud.”

— David Foster Wallace

385. “Datum: At least one-third of ancient rulers’ seers and magicians were in fact fired or killed early in their tenure because it emerged that the bulk of what they foresaw or intuited was irrelevant. Not incorrect, just irrelevant, pointless.”

— David Foster Wallace

386. “But from special it’s not very far to Alone.”

— David Foster Wallace

387. “Here is how to handle being a feral prodigy.”

— David Foster Wallace

388. “People turned out so identical in certain root domestic particulars it made Gately feel strange sometimes, like he was in possession of certain overlarge private facts to which no man should be entitled.”

— David Foster Wallace

389. “You’re supposed to be strong enough to exert some control over how much you want to hide, and you’re so desperate to feel some kind of control that you settle for the appearance of control.”

— David Foster Wallace

390. “The far north of Manitoba. Forbidding wastelands. The center of nothing.”

— David Foster Wallace

391. “American human beings are a slippery and protean bunch in real life, hard as hell to get any kind of universal handle on.”

— David Foster Wallace

392. “It’s no coincidence it’s the gurus on mountains who’re wise. You get to the top: you’re already theirs.”

— David Foster Wallace

393. “The executive intern responded: ‘Do we all really value a painting more than a photograph anymore?”

— David Foster Wallace

394. “The thing about people who are truly and malignantly crazy: their real genius is for making the people around them think they themselves are crazy.”

— David Foster Wallace

395. “Once he’d been set off inside, it mattered so much that he was somehow afraid to show how much it mattered.”

— David Foster Wallace

396. “That females are capable of being just as vulgar about sexual and eliminatory functions as males.”

— David Foster Wallace

397. “What if I told you she could because she’s had this happen and she totally knows it’s possible to be just a thing but just like Victor Frankl that every minute from then on minute by minute if you want you can choose to be more if you want, you can choose to be a human being and have it mean something? Then what would you say?”

— David Foster Wallace

398. “I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture – a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It’s maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it’s not these things, quite. It’s more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I’m small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It’s wanting to jump overboard.”

— David Foster Wallace

399. “If some people read my fiction and see it as fundamentally about philosophical ideas, what it probably means is that these are pieces where the characters are not as alive and interesting as I meant them to be.”

— David Foster Wallace

400. “Callers who even more unconsciously blemish-scanned or nostril-explored looked up to find horrified expressions on the video-faces at the other end. All of which resulted in videophonic stress.”

— David Foster Wallace