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

402. “The thing about people who are truly and malignantly crazy: their real genius is for making the people around them think they themselves are crazy.”

— David Foster Wallace

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

407. “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

408. “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

409. “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

410. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

412. “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

413. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

416. “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

417. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

420. “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

421. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

423. “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

424. “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

425. “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

426. “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

427. “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

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

— 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. “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

431. “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

432. “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

433. “He considered getting up to check the color of the bong he’d be using but decided that obsessive checking and convulsive movements could compromise the atmosphere of casual calm he needed to maintain while he waited, protruding but not moving, for the woman he’d met at a design session for his agency’s small campaign for her small theater company’s new Wedekind festival, while he waited for this woman, with whom he’d had intercourse twice, to honor her casual promise.”

— David Foster Wallace

434. “Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is. Such endurance is, as it happens, the distillate of what is, today, in this world neither I nor you have made, heroism.”

— David Foster Wallace

435. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

439. “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

440. “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

441. “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

442. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

444. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

446. “Hence also the weird viewer complicity behind TV’s sham “breakthrough programs”: Joe Briefcase needs that PR-patina of “freshness” and “outrageousness” to quiet his conscience while he goes about getting from television what we’ve all been trained to want from it: some strangely American, profoundly shallow, and eternally temporary reassurance.”

— David Foster Wallace

447. “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

448. “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

449. “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

450. “The wraith responds vehemently that... No! No! Any conversation or interchange is better than none at all, to trust him on this, that the worst kind of gut-wrenching intergenerational interface is better than withdrawal or hiddenness on either side.”

— David Foster Wallace