Top 500 David Foster Wallace Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

403. “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

404. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

406. “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

407. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

409. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

412. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

414. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

416. “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

417. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

419. “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

420. “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

421. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

423. “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

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

— 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. “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

427. “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

428. “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

429. “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

430. “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

431. “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

432. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

434. “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

435. “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

436. “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

437. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

439. “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

440. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

442. “Over half the admits to psych wards are things like cheerleaders who swallow two bottles of Mydol over a high-school breakup or gray lonely asexual depressing people rendered inconsolable by the death of a pet. The cathartic trauma of actually going in somewhere.”

— David Foster Wallace

443. “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

444. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

446. “To make a long story short, Cantorian set theory helps unify and clarify math in the sense that all mathematical entities can now be understood as fundamentally the same kind of thing-a set.”

— David Foster Wallace

447. “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

448. “He was unsure what the thing inside him was and was unprepared to commit himself to the course of action that would be required to explore the question.”

— David Foster Wallace

449. “The German logician Kant was right in this respect, human beings are all pretty much identical in terms of our hardwiring. Although we are seldom conscious of it, we are all basically just instruments or expressions of our evolkutiuonary drives, which are themselves the expressions of forces that are infinitely larger and more important than we are.”

— David Foster Wallace

450. “That’s why people use terms like flow or effortless to describe writing that they regard as really superb. They’re not saying effortless in terms of it didn’t seem like the writer spent any work. It simply requires no effort to read it – the same way listening to an incredible storyteller talk out loud requires no effort to pay attention. Whereas when you’re bored, you’re conscious of how much effort is required to pay attention.”

— David Foster Wallace