Top 500 David Foster Wallace Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

409. “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

410. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

413. “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

414. “His hands were no bigger than a four-year-old girl’s. It was surreal. This massive authoritative figure, with a huge red meaty face and thick walrus mustache and dewlaps and a neck that spilled over the rim of his shirt-collar, and his hands were tiny and pink and hairless and butt-soft, delicate as shells. The hands were the capper. I barely made it out of the office before it started.”

— David Foster Wallace

415. “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

416. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

418. “Like most religious mathematicians from Pythagoras to Godel, Bolzano believes that math is the Language of God and that profound metaphysical truths can be derived and proved mathematically.”

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

420. “Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he’s devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It’s hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.”

— David Foster Wallace

421. “The mother at thirty with face commencing to display the faint seams of the plan for the second face life had in store for her and which she feared would be her own mother’s.”

— David Foster Wallace

422. “What if in fact there were ever only two really distinct individual people walking around back there in history’s mist? That all difference descends from this difference? The whole and the partial. The damaged and the intact. The deformed and the paralyzingly beautiful. The insane and the attendant. The hidden and the blindingly open. The performer and the audience. No Zen-type One, always rather Two, one upside-down in a convex lens.”

— David Foster Wallace

423. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

425. “Another thing he laid in when he’d committed himself to one last marijuana vacation was petroleum jelly.”

— David Foster Wallace

426. “It’s painful to believe that the would-be “public servants” you’re forced to choose between are all phonies whose only real concern is their own care and feeding and who will lie so outrageously and with such a straight face that you know they’ve just got to believe you’re an idiot. So who wouldn’t yawn and turn away, trade apathy and cynicism for the hurt of getting treated with contempt?”

— David Foster Wallace

427. “Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists.”

— David Foster Wallace

428. “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

429. “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

430. “When he settles in with the tray and cartridge, the TP’s viewer’s digital display reads 1927h.”

— David Foster Wallace

431. “And he wishes, in the cold quiet of his archer’s heart, that he himself could feel the intensity of their reconciliations as strongly as he feels that of their battles.”

— David Foster Wallace

432. “Writing fiction takes me out of time. I sit down and the clock will not exist for me for a few hours. That’s probably as close to immortal as we’ll ever get.”

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

435. “Your personal will is the web your disease sits and spins in. The will you call your own ceased to be yours as of who knows how many Substance-drenched years ago.”

— David Foster Wallace

436. “I had to face: I had chosen. My choice, this was love. I had chosen I think the way out of the chains of the cage. I needed this woman. Without her to choose over myself, there was only pain and not choosing, rolling drunkenly and making fantasies of death.”

— David Foster Wallace

Featured in: Romance Quotes

437. “But it is not I the spy who have crept inside television’s boundaries. It is vice versa. Television, even the mundane little businesses of its production, has become my – our – own interior. And we seem a jaded, weary, but willing and above all knowledgeable Audience. And this knowledgeability utterly transforms the possibilities and hazards of “creativity” in television.”

— David Foster Wallace

438. “She regarded the things that were important to me as her enemy, not realizing that they were, in fact, the “me” she seemed so jealously to covet.”

— David Foster Wallace

439. “It always seems to be important to have at least one person in the vicinity to hate.”

— David Foster Wallace

440. “Time wasn’t passing so much as kneeling beside him in a torn tee-shirt disclosing the rodent-nosed tits of a man who disdains the care of his once-comely bod.”

— David Foster Wallace

441. “Breasts are uniformly zeppelinesque and in various perilous stages of semiconfinement.”

— David Foster Wallace

442. “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

443. “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

444. “In other words, Cantor is able to show that real numbers themselves can serve as the limits of fundamental sequences of reals, meaning his system of definitions is self-enclosed and VIR-proof.”

— David Foster Wallace

445. “Alls – how it’s possible even the worst things that can happen to you can end up being positive factors in who you are.”

— David Foster Wallace

446. “That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt.”

— David Foster Wallace

447. “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

448. “All I’m saying is that it’s shortsighted to blame TV. It’s simply another symptom. TV didn’t invent our aesthetic childishness here any more than the Manhattan Project invented aggression.”

— David Foster Wallace

449. “Then Poor Tony’s body began to swell. He watched his limbs become airy white dirigibles and felt them deny his authority and detach from him and float sluggishly up snout-first into the steel-mill sparks the ceiling rained. He suddenly felt nothing, or rather Nothing, a pre-tornadic stillness of zero sensation, as if he were the very space he occupied.”

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace