Top 500 David Foster Wallace Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “There are secrets within secrets, though – always.”

— David Foster Wallace

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

360. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

362. “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

363. “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

364. “I fear this feeling more than I fear anything, man. More than pain, or my mom dying, or environmental toxicity. Anything.”

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

366. “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

367. “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

368. “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

369. “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

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

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

— 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. “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

375. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

377. “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

378. “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

379. “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

380. “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

381. “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

382. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

385. “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

386. “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

387. “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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388. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

390. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

392. “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

393. “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

394. “It’s not what you lift, it’s where you carry it.”

— David Foster Wallace

395. “That old cartridge, Nichols and the big Indian. Distortion. They give you a general here right? They put you under. It’s not that bad. I’ll go willingly.”

— David Foster Wallace

396. “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

397. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

399. “I think the world divides neatly into those who are excited by the managed induction of terror and those who are not. I do not find terror exciting. I find it terrifying.”

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace