Top 100 David Foster Wallace Quotes
#1. Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I'm bullshitting myself, morally speaking?
David Foster Wallace
#2. You have to understand, writing a novel gets very weird and invisible-friend-from-childhood-ish. Then you kill that thing, which was never really alive except in your imagination, and you're supposed to go buy groceries and talk to people at parties and stuff.
David Foster Wallace
#3. That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we're all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine ...
David Foster Wallace
#4. The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.
David Foster Wallace
#6. No more Network reluctance to make a program too entertaining for fear its commercials would pale in comparison.
David Foster Wallace
#7. God, what a ghastly enterprise to be in, though
and what an odd way to achieve success. I'm an exhibitionist who wants to hide, but is unsuccessful at hiding; therefore, somehow I succeed.
David Foster Wallace
#8. And Lo, for the Earth was empty of Form, and void. And Darkness was all over the Face of the Deep. And We said: 'Look at that fucker Dance.
David Foster Wallace
#10. 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
#13. I can remember watching large, tentative, individual flakes of snow falling and blowing around aimlessly in the wind generated by the train through the window of the CTA commuter line from Lincoln Park back up to Libertyville, and thinking, 'This is my crude approximation of a human life.
David Foster Wallace
#14. I will be conveyed to an Emergency Room of some kind, where I will be detained as long as I do not respond to questions, and then, when I do respond to questions, I will be sedated; so it will be an inversion of standard travel, the ambulance and ER: I'll make the journey first, then depart.
David Foster Wallace
#15. My fingers are mated into a mirrored series of what manifests, to me, as the letter X.
David Foster Wallace
#16. Worship power-you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever ore power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart-you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.
David Foster Wallace
#17. Someone has farted; no one knows just who, but this isn't like a normal adult place where everybody coolly pretends a fart didn't happen; here everybody has to make their little comment.
David Foster Wallace
#18. The father of Ruth van Cleve's child, she reports, is under the protection and care of the Norfolk County Correctional Authority, awaiting sentencing for what Ruth van Cleve describes several times as operating a pharmaceutical company without a license.
David Foster Wallace
#19. It's well-known that an overkeen sense of obligation tends to afflict the congenitally nice.
David Foster Wallace
#20. God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about.
David Foster Wallace
#22. The greatest sin is appearing naive or old-fashioned so that somebody can give you a sort of a very cool arch smile and devastate you with one extraordinarily crafted line that puts kind of a hole in your pretentious balloon.
David Foster Wallace
#24. Imagine the day after the Berlin Wall came down if everybody in East Germany was plump and comfortable-looking and dressed in Caribbean pastels, and you'll have a pretty good idea what the Fort Lauderdale Airport terminal looks like today.
David Foster Wallace
#25. One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.
David Foster Wallace
#26. Perhaps what most of us perceive as the centers of ourselves are simply no longer needed. And we both know that the absence of function, in nature, means death. There is nothing superfluous in nature.
David Foster Wallace
#27. A thing among things, its self's soul so much vapor aloft, falling as rain and then rising, the sun up and down like a yoyo.
David Foster Wallace
#28. The fun of reading as "an exchange between consciousnesses, a way for human beings to talk to each other about stuff we can't normally talk about."
David Foster Wallace
#29. When he settles in with the tray and cartridge, the TP's viewer's digital display reads 1927h.
David Foster Wallace
#30. This by the way is known as Werther's Axiom, whereby quote The Intensity of a desire D is inversely proportional to the ease of D's gratification. Known also as Romance.
David Foster Wallace
#31. Boo, I think I no longer believe in monsters as faces in the floor or feral infants or vampires or whatever. I think at seventeen now I believe the only real monsters might be the type of liar where there's simply no way to tell. The ones who give nothing away.
David Foster Wallace
#32. 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
#33. The music's still going, going absolutely nowhere, like Philip Glass on Quaaludes.
David Foster Wallace
#35. Some words have to be explicitly uttered, Lenore. Only by actually uttering certain words does one really DO what one SAYS. 'Love' is one of those words, performative words. Some words can literally make things real.
David Foster Wallace
#36. What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves, they've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.
David Foster Wallace
#37. One paradox of professional writing is that books written solely for money and/or acclaim will almost never be good enough to garner either.
David Foster Wallace
#38. The reasons that center on others are easy to manipulate. All hollow things are light.
David Foster Wallace
#40. We're kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we're uneasy about the fact that we wish they'd come back - I mean, what's wrong with us?
David Foster Wallace
#41. Try to let what is unfair teach you ... what is unfair can be a stern but invaluable teacher ... you can be shaped, or you can be broken. There is not much in between. Try to learn. Be coachable. Try to learn from everybody, especially those who fail. This is hard.
David Foster Wallace
#42. I think the main function of contemporary irony is to protect the
speaker from being interpreted as naive or sentimental.
David Foster Wallace
#43. If you close your eyes on a busy urban sidewalk the sound of everybody's different footwear's footsteps all put together sounds like something getting chewed by something huge and tireless and patient.
David Foster Wallace
#44. Act in Haste, Repent at Leisure would seem to have been almost custom-designed for the case of tattoos.
David Foster Wallace
#45. - then more Losses, with the Substance seeming like the only consolation against the pain of the mounting Losses, and of course you're in Denial about it being the Substance that's causing the very Losses it's consoling you about -
David Foster Wallace
#46. I am wonderful fun to talk to. I'm a consummate professional. People leave my parlor in states. You are here. It's conversation-time. Shall we discuss Byzantine erotica?
David Foster Wallace
#47. 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
#48. I have heard upscale adult U.S. citizens ask the ship's Guest Relations Desk whether snorkeling necessitates getting wet ... I now know the precise mixocological difference between a Slippery Nipple and a fuzzy navel.
David Foster Wallace
#49. Today's person spends way more time in front of screens, in florescent lit rooms, in cubicles being on one end of the other of an electronic data transfer ... What is it to be human and alive and exercise your humanity in that kind of exchange?
David Foster Wallace
#50. Here is how to sit through small openings of your father's first art films, surrounded by surly foreign cigarette smoke and conversations so pretentious you literally cannot believe them, you're sure you have misheard them.
David Foster Wallace
#51. No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.
David Foster Wallace
#53. Don't ask why if you don't want to die. Do as you're told if you want to get old.
David Foster Wallace
#54. He had never been so anxious for the arrival of a woman he did not want to see.
David Foster Wallace
#56. At root, vulgar just means popular on a mass scale. It is the semantic opposite of pretentious or snobby. It is humility with a comb-over. It is Nielsen ratings and Barnum's axiom and the real bottom line. It is big, big business.
David Foster Wallace
#57. 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
#58. I knew my limitations and the limitations of the courts I played on, and adjusted thusly. I was at my best in bad conditions.
David Foster Wallace
#59. Genuine pathological openness is about as seductive as Tourette's Syndrome.
David Foster Wallace
#60. The air-conditioning was more like a vague gesture toward the abstract idea of air-conditioning.
David Foster Wallace
#61. Why do prostitutes when they get straight always try and get so prim? It's like long-repressed librarian-ambitions come flooding out.
David Foster Wallace
#63. Irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It's critical and destructive, a ground-clearing
David Foster Wallace
#64. Ast year's Best-Sex-Scene-in-a-film winner Vince Voyeur's real name turns out to be John LaForme. Rhetorical Q.: How, if one's real name was John LaForme, could that person possibly feel the need for a nom de guerre?
David Foster Wallace
#65. My worst character flaw that I'm conscious of is that I tend to think my way into circles instead of resolving anything. It's paralyzing and boring for people around me.
David Foster Wallace
#66. A real leader can somehow get us to do certain things that deep down we think are good and want to be able to do but usually can't get ourselves to do on our own.
David Foster Wallace
#67. To experience commitment as the loss of options, a type of death, the death of childhood's limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress-this will happen, mark me. Childhood's end.
David Foster Wallace
#68. The truth is that there's no difference between a life and a story? But a life pretends to be something more? But it really isn't more? LENORE:
David Foster Wallace
#69. We're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we've never even met?
David Foster Wallace
#70. The drunk and the maimed both are dragged forward out of the arena like a boneless Christ, one man under each arm, feet dragging, eyes on the aether.
David Foster Wallace
#71. Who teaches your U.S.A. children how to choose their temple? What to love enough not to think two times?
David Foster Wallace
#72. they can all stand quiescent in airless venues for extended periods, their eyes' expressions that unique NYC combination of Zen meditation and clinical depression, clearly unhappy but never complaining.
David Foster Wallace
#73. Or like just another manipulative pseudopomo Bullshit artist who's trying to salvage a fiasco by dropping back to a metadimention and commenting on the fiasco itself. (p. 158)
David Foster Wallace
#74. 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
#75. -you can prove that there are exactly as many real numbers between 0 and 1 as between 0 and any other finite number you can think of.
David Foster Wallace
#76. I like the fans' sound at night. Do you? It's like somebody big far away goes like: it'sOKit'sOKit'sOKit'sOK, over and over. From very far away.
David Foster Wallace
#77. He was trying to pay close attention to his surroundings as a way to avert thought and anxiety.
David Foster Wallace
#78. [T]o really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help.
David Foster Wallace
#80. Atwater knew - as did everyone at Style, though by some strange unspoken consensus it was never said aloud - that this was the single great informing conflict of the American psyche. The management of insignificance. It was the great syncretic bond of US monoculture.
David Foster Wallace
#81. [ ... ] his own father told him that talent is sort of a dark gift, that talent is its own expectation: it is there from the start and either lived up to or lost.
David Foster Wallace
#83. The most dangerous thing about an academic education is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract thinking instead of simply paying attention to what's going on in front of me.
David Foster Wallace
#84. Chutes and Ladders was perhaps the most sadistic board game ever invented. Adults loathed the game; children loved it. The universe thus dictated that an adult invariably got snookered into playing the game with a child.
David Foster Wallace
#85. Sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them.
David Foster Wallace
#86. You decide. You be the judge. It says You are welcome regardless of severity. Severity is in the eye of the sufferer, it says. Pain is pain.
David Foster Wallace
#87. A U.S. of modern A. where the State is not a team or a code, but a sort of sloppy intersection of desires and fears, where the only public consensus a boy must surrender to is the acknowledged primacy of straight-line pursuing this flat and short-sighted idea of personal happiness.
David Foster Wallace
#89. 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
#90. your huge blocks of industrial ice packed in fragrant sawdust, the huge blocks of man-sized ice with flaws way inside like trapped white faces, white flames of internal cracks.
David Foster Wallace
#91. Mathematical thinking is abstract, but it's also thoroughly private-sector and results-oriented.
David Foster Wallace
#92. So listen
one way to lower the flag to half-mast is just to lower the flag. There's another way though. You can also just raise the pole. You can raise the pole to like twice it's original height.
David Foster Wallace
#93. I perhaps could have been somewhat better. One of the interesting things about playing competitive sports as a child is that you confront your own limitations rather starkly at a certain point.
David Foster Wallace
#95. 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
#96. The punter never made her feel quite so taken care of, never made her feel about to be entered by something that didn't know she was there and yet was all about making her feel good anyway, coming in. Entertainment is blind.
David Foster Wallace
#98. What renders a truth meaningful, worthwhile, & c. is its relevance, which in turn requires extraordinary discernment and sensitivity to context, questions of value, and overall point - otherwise we might as well all just be computers downloading raw data to one another.)
David Foster Wallace
#99. Show me somebody who really knows what irony means and I'll show you a bullshit artist.
David Foster Wallace
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