Top 100 Wallace Quotes
#1. Ragweed,wild oat,vetch,butcher grass,invaginate volunteer beans,all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother's soft hand on your cheek ...
David Foster Wallace
#2. I am completing a book I began back in 2002 called 'Poems in the Manner of.' 'The Matador of Metaphor' is from this manuscript. It is an homage to Wallace Stevens that appropriates certain of his techniques.
David Lehman
#3. I was saying yes because when you're in love, the world is full of possibilities, and when you're in love, you want to take every single one of them.
Danny Wallace
#4. I am decidedly of the opinion that in very many instances we can trace such a necessary connexion, especially among birds, and often with more complete success than in the case which I have here attempted to explain.
Alfred Russel Wallace
#5. American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has developed without its essential corrective, which is belonging.
Wallace Stegner
#7. 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
#8. Sigh for me, night-wind, in the noisy leaves of the oak. / I am tired. Sleep for me, heaven over the hill. / Shout for me, loudly and loudly, joyful sun, when you rise.
Wallace Stevens
#9. After a day and a half or so the traveler will realize that crossing the continent by Interstate he gets to know the country about as well as a cable messenger knows the sea bottom.
Wallace Stegner
#10. Jessie Wallace was the first time I erupted. She was late, she was young. She's not like that any more. I lost my temper. It was silly and I burst into tears and ran up to the producer. I said I had been terrible and amateur.
Barbara Windsor
#11. Recollection, I have found, is usually about half invention ...
Wallace Stegner
#13. A man thirty years old, I said to myself, should have his field of life all ploughed, and his planting well done; for after that it is summer time.
Lew Wallace
#15. The point here is ... to be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.
David Foster Wallace
#16. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.
David Foster Wallace
#17. To be envied, admired, is not a feeling. Nor is fame it feeling. There are feelings associated with fame, but few of them are any more enjoyable than the feelings associated with envy of fame.
David Foster Wallace
#18. There was somewhere, if you knew where to find it, some place where money could be made like drawing water from a well, some Big Rock Candy Mountain where life was effortless and rich and unrestricted and full of adventure and action, where something could be had for nothing.
Wallace Stegner
#19. 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
#20. You can not retain a true and clear vision of wealth if you are constantly turning your attention to opposing pictures, whether they be external or imaginary.
Wallace D. Wattles
#21. People should like poetry the way a child likes snow, and they would if poets wrote it.
Wallace Stevens
#22. Pride is never so loud as when in chains.
Lew Wallace
#23. Then she realizes there's nothing meaningful or particularly interesting about seeing a celebrity in person, or even meeting one briefly.
Matt Wallace
#24. When others are having hard times and poor business, you will find your greatest opportunities.
Wallace D. Wattles
#26. There is a perfect rout of characters in every man - and every man is like an actor's trunk, full of strange creatures, new & old. But an actor and his trunk are two different things
Wallace Stevens
#27. The partaker partakes of that which changes him. The child that touches takes character from the thing, the body, it touches.
Wallace Stevens
#28. 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
#29. Sometimes it's not about making a ton of money in one night, just to spend the rest of your life waiting on the next payday. You will fare better investing time, planning, strategic thinking in order to secure a stable, fruitful future.
Carlos Wallace
#30. The wind shifts like this:
Like a human without illusions,
Who still feels irrational things within her.
Wallace Stevens
#31. I am not someone who throws around the word 'self-esteem.' It is a fictional description.
Nicolle Wallace
#32. The magnificent cause of being,
The imagination, the one reality
In this imagined world ...
Wallace Stevens
#33. He had finished and collected the three years of drafts [of Infinite Jest], and finally sat down and typed the whole thing. Wallace didn't really type; he input the giant thing twice, with one finger. But a really fast finger.
David Lipsky
#35. daily visual reminder of the depths drink sunk him to, so Mrs. O. had gone around with her nose bent over flat against her left cheek - Bud O.'d tagged her with a left cross - until U.H.I.D. referred her to Al-Anon, which
David Foster Wallace
#36. To live in the world but outside of existing conceptions of it.
Wallace Stevens
#37. Largeness is a lifelong matter. You grow because you are not content not to. You are like a beaver that chews constantly because if it doesn't, it's teeth grow long and lock. You grow because you are a grower; you're large because you can't stand to be small.
Wallace Stegner
#38. Then there was a woman, in her mid-fifties about, who in almost every respect was perfectly normal. But this was the way with these people: in so many respects they were normal, there was just that one thing, that one terrible thing.
Daniel Wallace
#39. 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
#40. Hal Incandenza has an almost obsessive dislike for deLint, whom he tells Mario he sometimes cannot quite believe is even real, and tries to get to the side of, to see whether deLint has a true z coordinate or is just a cutout or projection.
David Foster Wallace
#41. He heard her low accord,
Half prayer and half ditty,
And He felt a subtle quiver,
That was not heavenly love,
Or pity.
This is not writ
In any book.
Wallace Stevens
#42. There is some history that I want not to have happened. I resist the consequences of being Nemesis.
Wallace Stegner
#43. Living in the midst of abundance we have the greatest difficulty in seeing that the supply of natural wealth is limited and that the constant increase of population is destined to reduce the American standard of living unless we deal more sanely with our resources.
Wallace Carothers
#44. Anti-narrative sequences of a man (Watt) sitting in a dark bedroom drinking bourbon while his wife (Heath) and an Amway representative (Johnson) have acrobatic coitus in the background's lit hallway.
David Foster Wallace
#45. It is the ultimate metafictional act, not homicide but suicide. (Wallace would say that one of the problems of metafiction is that there is no difference.)
D.T. Max
#47. To be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I'm scared about how sappy this'll look in print, saying this.
David Foster Wallace
#48. Had numerous pairs of dress chinos and blue blazers and Topsiders, and a smile that looked as though someone had plugged him in.
David Foster Wallace
#49. The law of gratitude is the natural principle that action and reaction are always equal and in opposite directions.
Wallace D. Wattles
#50. 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
#52. A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane.
David Foster Wallace
#53. When you switch your focus from the "we" to the "me", the goal from "team" to "self", you upset the balance of the whole. Consequentially, that redistribution of effort impedes success.
Carlos Wallace
#54. We must endure our thoughts all night, until the bright obvious stands motionless in the cold.
Wallace Stevens
#55. The clear lesson of New England's history is that when there are not enough suitable men around to run the world, women are perfectly capable of doing so.
Wallace Stegner
#56. When people call it that I always get pissed off because I always think depression sounds like you just get like really sad, you get quiet and melancholy and just like sit quietly by the window sighing or just lying around. A state of not caring about anything. A kind of blue kind of peaceful state.
David Foster Wallace
#57. I have to blame myself for not finding any way of reaching him, but I can't feel that either Ruth or I had anything much to do with his corruption.
His personal motives were freedom and pleasure, and he misread them both.
Wallace Stegner
#58. Set your ideal as near to perfection as your imagination is capable of forming the conception.
Wallace D. Wattles
#59. From oriole to crow, note the decline
In music. Crow is realist. But, then,
Oriole, also, may be realist.
Wallace Stevens
#60. Hello?' said the taxi driver, and I realized that it's all very well having an internal monologue, but it does tend to leave the other person a bit stranded, conversationally.
Danny Wallace
#61. Well, don't do it anymore. You deserve someone who wants you every time you walk in the room.
Stacey Wallace Benefiel
#63. Sharing pillow talk with the wrong people can make a hard bed to lie on, and will surely lead to nightmares in your relationship.
Carlos Wallace
#64. He said he didn't think Lenore should go to the G.O.D.
"Nobody ever finds anybody in a place like that," he said, "People don't go to a place like that to look for other people. That's the opposite of the whole concept that's behind the thing.
David Foster Wallace
#66. My ancestors further back than the first Roman were Hebrews." "The stubborn pride of thy race is not lost in thee," said Arrius, observing a flush upon the rower's face. "Pride is never so loud as when in chains." "What cause hast thou for pride?" "That I am a Jew." Arrius smiled.
Lew Wallace
#67. The seriousness of being part of Operation Desert Storm-the first major foreign crisis for the United States after the end of the Cold War- was never lost upon us.
Carlos Wallace
#68. Acting is trying to be absolutely truthful; to get audiences to believe that you are a dean, when, actually, not only are you not the dean, but if you walked into the building they'd probably throw you out. That's very hard.
Wallace Shawn
#69. The Creative Power within us makes us into the image of that to which we give our attention.
Wallace D. Wattles
#70. The part of Mike Wallace drew me to the movie because I thought, what an outrageous part to play.
Christopher Plummer
#71. It was now December 7, 1941; the date that Franklin D. Roosevelt was destined to declare would live in infamy.
Randall Wallace
#72. Poetry ought to be a by-product of living, and you can't have a by-product unless you've got a product first.
Wallace Stegner
#73. 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
#74. I was clever enough to know that John Donne was offering something that was awfully enjoyable. I just wasn't clever enough to actually enjoy it.
Wallace Shawn
#75. The three biggest funerals in Alabama history define the state's contending loyalties, I was told: George Wallace's, Martin Luther King's, and Bear Bryant's.
Paul Theroux
#76. Whenever you find yourself hurrying, call a halt; fix your attention on the mental image of the thing you want, and being to give thanks that you are getting it. The exercise of GRATITUDE will never fail to strengthen your faith and renew your purpose
Wallace D. Wattles
#77. The whole quantum setup ends up being embarrassing in the special way something pretentious is embarrassing when it's also wrong.
David Foster Wallace
#78. I went to these mixers, you know, where you're supposed to meet people. And sure enough, some guy asked me for my phone number. but at the end of the evening he gave it back.
Marcia Wallace
#79. The wife of Ben-Hur, sat in her room in the beautiful villa by Misenum. It was noon, with a warm Italian sun making summer for the roses and vines outside. Everything in the apartment was Roman,
Lew Wallace
#80. Oh, sweet thy current by town and by tower, The green sunny vale and the dark linden bower; Thy waves as they dimple smile back on the plain, And Rhine, ancient river, thou'rt German again!
Horace Binney Wallace
#81. I led the life of an intellectual up until a certain age. I remember Freud's 'Interpretation of Dreams' was a big favorite when I was 11. It sounded so interesting. And it really was!
Wallace Shawn
#82. When you vote, you play Russian Roulette with a magazine fed pistol.
Tom Wallace
#83. Nothing was ever in any man that is not in you; no man ever had more spiritual or mental power than you can attain, or did greater things than you can accomplish. You can become what you want to be.
Wallace D. Wattles
#84. Before we ask where the leaders are, we should look in a mirror and ask the person we see "Why are you not leading"?
Carlos Wallace
#85. Also essential to math is the sense in which abstracting something can mean reducing it to its absolute skeletal essence, as in the abstract of an article or book. As such, it can mean thinking hard about things that for the most part people can't think hard about-because it drives them crazy.
David Foster Wallace
#86. Man's right to life means his right to have the free and unrestricted use of all the things which may be necessary to his fullest mental, spiritual, and physical unfoldment or, in other words, his right to be rich.
Wallace D. Wattles
#87. One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow
Wallace Stevens
#88. The happiness of love is in action; its test is what one is willing to do for others.
Lew Wallace
#89. You married me ... but you didn't marry what you could make out of me.
Wallace Stegner
#90. I know that I am one and I've made a living as an actor and I enjoy being an actor, but when I'm not actually doing it, I forget that I do it.
Wallace Shawn
#91. The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.
Wallace Stevens
#92. Every man can transform the world from one of monotony and drabness to one of excitement and adventure.
Irving Wallace
#93. But there was something about Dash Wallace that felt safe. Maybe it was the way he'd shut down all the fuck talk to hear what I had to say, or maybe it was the way he never made me feel as though he was doing me a favor by wanting me.
C.D. Reiss
#94. A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.
Wallace Stevens
#95. 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
#97. This wasn't life, of course. This was life support. This was what the medical world had fashioned to take the place of Purgatory.
Daniel Wallace
#98. I never grew up thinking, 'One day I will play so and so' because I wasn't expecting to be an actor at all.
Wallace Shawn
#100. No more Network reluctance to make a program too entertaining for fear its commercials would pale in comparison.
David Foster Wallace
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