Top 500 David Foster Wallace Quotes (2023 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “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

404. “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

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

— 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. “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

408. “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

409. “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

410. “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

411. “The examiners call their children their little Line 40s. That’s of course where you enter your CCDC from Form 2441 on the 1040. Some of the children were playing Collections. Near the horseshoe courts. Some of the older children. Liens on the toys, a jeopardy assessment and seizure of some of the smaller childrens’ plates; there was some of the usual crying.”

— David Foster Wallace

412. “You just never quite occurred out there, kid.”

— David Foster Wallace

413. “Naive people are, more or less by definition, unaware that they’re naive.”

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

415. “You know those mass-market cartridges, for the masses? The ones that are so bad they’re somehow perversely good? This was worse than that.”

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

418. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace

420. “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

421. “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

422. “It occurred to me that the movement of the amputated knob perfectly schematized what it would look like for someone to try to turn somersaults with one hand nailed to the floor. This was how I first became interested in the possibilities of annulation.”

— David Foster Wallace

423. “Lucien finally dies, rather a while after he’s quit shuddering like a clubbed muskie and seemed to them to die, as he finally sheds his body’s suit, Lucien finds his gut and throat again and newly whole, clean and unimpeded, and is free, catapulted over fans and the Convexity’s glass palisades at desperate speeds, soaring north, sounding a bell-clear and nearly maternal alarmed call-to-arms in all the world’s well-known tongues.”

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

425. “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

426. “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

427. “Aren’t there parts of ourselves that are just better left unfed?”

— David Foster Wallace

428. “He and Hal exchanged the very slight sorts of nods people use when they like each other past all need for politeness.”

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

430. “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

431. “There’s something elementally horrific about waking before dawn.”

— David Foster Wallace

432. “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

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. “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

435. “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

436. “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

437. “One of the great Greek contributions to the very concept of mathematics was the conscious recognition and emphasis of the fact that mathematical entities are abstractions, ideas entertained by the mind and sharply distinguished from physical objects or pictures.”

— David Foster Wallace

438. “He has that rare spinal appreciation for beauty in the ordinary that nature seems to bestow on those who have no native words for what they see.”

— David Foster Wallace

439. “Dostoevski informs everybody; or he ought to.”

— David Foster Wallace

440. “He was trying to pay close attention to his surroundings as a way to avert thought and anxiety.”

— David Foster Wallace

441. “The inactive viewer’s screen is the color of way out over the Atlantic looking straight down on a cold day.”

— David Foster Wallace

442. “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

443. “The happy pleasure of the person alone, yes?”

— David Foster Wallace

444. “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

445. “Every two or three generations the world gets vastly different, and the context in which you have to learn how to be a human being, or to have good relationships, or decide whether or not there is a God, or decide whether there’s such a thing as love, and whether it’s redemptive, become vastly different. And the structures with which you can communicate those dilemmas, or have characters struggle with them, seem to become appropriate and then inappropriate again and so on.”

— David Foster Wallace

446. “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

447. “Her expression is from Page 18 of the Victoria’s Secret catalogue.”

— David Foster Wallace

448. “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

449. “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

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

— David Foster Wallace