Top 500 David Foster Wallace Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

364. “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

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. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

371. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

373. “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

374. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

376. “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

377. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

380. “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

381. “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

382. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

384. “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

385. “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

386. “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

387. “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

388. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

391. “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

392. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

395. “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

396. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

398. “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

399. “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

400. “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