Top 500 David Foster Wallace Quotes (2023 Update)
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351. “This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.”

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

353. “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

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

360. “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

361. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

363. “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

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

367. “Almost anything that you pay close, direct attention to becomes interesting.”

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

369. “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

370. “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

371. “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

372. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

374. “Seminal.” He keeps saying it. “Seminal, seminal.”

— David Foster Wallace

375. “I called a cab, still in my towel. I jumped in the cab before it had even stopped at the gate. I actually said, “The nearest library with a cutting-edge professional grief- and trauma-therapy section, and step on it.”

— David Foster Wallace

376. “Like most clinically depressed patients, she appeared to function better in focused activity than in stasis. Their normal paralyzed stasis allowed these patients’ own minds to chew them apart. But it was always a titanic struggle to get them to do anything to help them focus.”

— David Foster Wallace

377. “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

378. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

380. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

382. “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

383. “This is what happens: you imagine the things I will say and then say them for me and then become angry with them. Without my mouth; it never opens. You speak to yourself, inventing sides. This itself is the habit of children: lazy, lonely, self.”

— David Foster Wallace

384. “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

385. “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

386. “There are very few innocent sentences in writing.”

— 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

388. “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

389. “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

390. “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

391. “Mathematical thinking is abstract, but it’s also thoroughly private-sector and results-oriented.”

— David Foster Wallace

392. “Lenore, it’s simply that I love you. You know that. Every fiber of your being is loved by every fiber of my being. The thought of things about you, concerning you, troubling you, that I don’t know about, makes blood run from my eyes, on the inside.”

— David Foster Wallace

393. “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

394. “It’s when people begin to fancy that they actually know something about literature that they cease to be literarily interesting, or even of any use to those that are.”

— David Foster Wallace

395. “The really desolate areas can get pretty crowded, of course, sometimes, so it’s good to get there early, get as much wandering as you can in before noon.”

— David Foster Wallace

396. “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

397. “If you really look at something, you can almost always tell what type of wage structure the person who made it was on.”

— David Foster Wallace

398. “I was looking at my sneakers and making my feet alternately pigeon-toed and then penguin-toed on the bedroom’s blue carpet.”

— 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. “The kid has no idea he even knows something’s wrong.”

— David Foster Wallace