Top 500 David Foster Wallace Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

355. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

357. “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

358. “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

359. “He didn’t reject the idea so much as not react to it and watch as it floated away.”

— David Foster Wallace

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

365. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

367. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

369. “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

370. “His white knit shirt and name-brand shorts were soaked through so you could see the straps of his jock biting into the soft ass I was handing him. He.”

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

372. “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

373. “Dieting makes me want to murder everyone around me.”

— David Foster Wallace

374. “Surely we all dealt with and reconciled ourselves to a life many of whose features were out of our control. It was part of living in a world full of other people with other interests.”

— David Foster Wallace

375. “Every whole person has ambitions, objectives, initiatives, goals. This one particular boy’s goal was to be able to press his lips to every square inch of his own body. His arms to the shoulders and most of the legs beneath the knee were child’s play. After these areas of his body, however, the difficulty increased with the abruptness of a coastal shelf. The boy came to understand that unimaginable challenges lay ahead of him. He was six.”

— David Foster Wallace

376. “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

377. “Booboo, we’ve been over this. I can’t be asleep if we’re talking.”

— David Foster Wallace

378. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

380. “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

381. “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

382. “That it takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak.”

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

384. “Apparently the term refugee can be plausibly denied if both – I’m quoting direct from Neil’s memo here – if both, a, no homemade wagons piled high with worldly goods are pulled by slow bovine animals with curvy horns, and b, if the percentage of children under six who are either, a, naked, or b, squalling at the top of their lungs, or c, both, is under 20% of the total number of children under six in transit.”

— David Foster Wallace

385. “One possible way of couching it is to choose to say that we will take apart your skull very gently and reconstruct a skull for you that will have a highly developed bump of clarity and a slight concave dent where the fear-instinct used to be.”

— David Foster Wallace

386. “You can be at certain parties and not really be there.”

— David Foster Wallace

387. “None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death.”

— David Foster Wallace

388. “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

389. “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

390. “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

391. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

394. “We’re going to reinvent not just government but history. Torch the past.”

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

396. “What if, when Tracy Austin writes that after her 1989 car crash, ‘I quickly accepted that there was nothing I could do about it,’ the statement is not only true but exhaustively descriptive of the entire acceptance process she went through?”

— David Foster Wallace

397. “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

398. “Respecting infinite sets, for example, Intuitionism is rabidly anti-Cantor and Formalism staunchly pro-Cantor, even though both Formalism and Intuitionism are anti-Plato and Cantor is a diehard Platonist. Which, migrainous or not, means we’re back to metaphysics: the modern wrangle over math’s procedures is ultimately a dispute over the ontological status of math entities.”

— David Foster Wallace

399. “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

400. “It’s unvarying and kind of spirit-killing for a Staffer to watch, that the only way your addict ever learns anything is the hard way. It has to happen to them to like upset the idolatry.”

— David Foster Wallace