Top 100 Wallace's Quotes
#1. 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
#2. While Max appears to greatly admire Wallace as a writer and feel compassion for him as a man, he is never starry-eyed, or pulls his punches. Every Love Story is a Ghost Story is as illuminating, multifaceted, and serious an estimation of David Foster Wallace's life and work as we can hope to find.
Elissa Schappell
#3. Mike Wallace's interviews may make great television, but they don't produce great evidence.
Errol Morris
#4. I wasn't a very good waitress, always spilling things on people and forgetting things. I once spilled ashes all over Mike Wallace's table.
Tracy Pollan
#5. I'm ashamed and embarrassed to say that I've read very little of David Foster Wallace's work. It's a huge gap in my education, one of many.
Ben Fountain
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. Then she realizes there's nothing meaningful or particularly interesting about seeing a celebrity in person, or even meeting one briefly.
Matt Wallace
#9. 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
#10. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. The whole quantum setup ends up being embarrassing in the special way something pretentious is embarrassing when it's also wrong.
David Foster Wallace
#22. 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
#23. 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
#25. Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if he's far down enough (down where I have been and am rising from, I am really saying), he can't afford self-doubt and he can't let other people's opinions, even a father's, keep him from writing.
Wallace Stegner
#26. Because the Empire controls the media, we can turn any news to the Emperor's advantage.
Daniel Wallace
#27. The people around you are you. They share your history. They can even write it with you. And when you lose one, there's no doubt you lose some of yourself, however they're lost.
Danny Wallace
#28. And before any Christian readers get all offended - relax. I'm not saying that I'm the new Jesus. I'm just saying there's a very good chance that I might be.
Danny Wallace
#30. There are no choices without personal freedom, Buckeroo. It's not us who are dead inside. These things you find so weak and contemptible in us
these are just the hazards of being free.
David Foster Wallace
#31. I never, even for a moment, doubted what they'd told me. This is why it is that adults and even parents can, unwittingly, be cruel: they cannot imagine doubt's complete absence. They have forgotten.
David Foster Wallace
#32. I think, don't you, that a girl with any delicacy of feeling couldn't bring herself to marry a man indirectly responsible for her father's death. No matter how much she was in love with him.
Wallace Stegner
#33. For some reason, people find me funny. It's quite hard to define why a thought is funny. It's even harder to define why a person would be funny. It's a word that I can't define at all. But whether I know quite what it is or not, I seem to be it.
Wallace Shawn
#34. My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist will blow away your expectation of what late-model literature has to be. Unified by obsessions too eerie not to be real, this gorgeous rearrangement of our century's mental furniture is testimony to a new talent of Burroughs/Coover/Acker scale.
David Foster Wallace
#35. The stars are putting on their glittering belts,
They throw around their shoulders cloaks that flash
Like a great shadow's last embellishment
Wallace Stevens
#37. My interest in chemistry was started by reading Robert Kennedy Duncan's popular books while a high school student in Des Moines, Iowa, so that after some delay when it was possible for me to go to college I had definitely decided to specialize in chemistry.
Wallace Carothers
#38. Sounds kind of ad hoc and jerry-rigged and haphazard.' 'Everybody's a critic. This wasn't an aesthetic endeavor.
David Foster Wallace
#39. What is there in life except one's ideas,
Good air, good friend, what is there in life?
Wallace Stevens
#40. There's nothing, repeat, nothing to be ashamed of when you're going through a depression. If you get help, the chances of your licking it are really good. But, you have to get yourself onto a safe path.
Mike Wallace
#41. I am a clairaudient healer. My specialty is being able to discern the blocks within a person's energy that are prohibiting them from being free, happy, and powerful.
Dee Wallace
#42. The actor's role in the community is quite unlike anyone else's. Businessmen, for example, don't take their clothes off or cry in front of strangers in the course of their work. Actors do.
Wallace Shawn
#43. And her eyes. I cannot say what color Lenore Beadsman's eyes are; I cannot look at them; they are the sun to me.
David Foster Wallace
#44. You can't really discover the most interesting conflicts and problems in a subject until you've tried to write about them. At that point, one discovers discontinuities in the data, perhaps, or in one's own thinking; then the act of writing forces you to work harder to resolve these contradictions.
Anthony F. C. Wallace
#45. I think it's easy to stop smoking; it's just hard not to commit a felony after you stop.
David Foster Wallace
#46. I'm in awe of people out there who deal with Alzheimer's, because they have to deal with death 10 times over, year after year.
Marcia Wallace
#47. How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.
Wallace Stevens
#49. There's not a better job in journalism than the one we have, seriously on '60 Minutes' - not a better job.
Mike Wallace
#50. For me, a play is a form of writing which isn't complete until it is interpreted by actors. But it's still a form of writing. And so most of my time is spent thinking about how to write a sentence.
Wallace Shawn
#51. There's nothing regular about my life at all, really. I don't keep a regular schedule and every day is different. It's all rather chaotic.
Wallace Shawn
#52. If it seems like he's going to die she'll call for me. This is how we talk. In the land of the dying, sentences go unfinished, you know how they're going to end. So
Daniel Wallace
#53. Stop making excuses for why you can't let yourself have this. It's not conventional but that doesn't mean it isn't real. What's more important? Loving the man that loves you, or trying to achieve this bullshit idea you have of what a perfect relationship is supposed to be?
Stacey Wallace Benefiel
#54. The horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle: That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.
- David Foster Wallace, "Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness" (2005)
David Foster Wallace
#55. There's just nothing stronger than the heart of a volunteer.
Randall Wallace
#56. I've learned through a series of trials and errors that the median space is actually what's missing in our daily walk.
Carlos Wallace
#57. 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
#58. She was the kind of fatally pretty and nubile wraithlike figure who glides through the sweaty junior-high corridors of every nocturnal emitter's dreamscape.
David Foster Wallace
#59. It's the simplest things in your life that help you achieve the greatest BLESSINGS. None of those things cost you, yet they can bring abundant reward. Faith, honesty and good manners will take you places and assist you in obtaining things that money NEVER will.
Carlos Wallace
#61. The sky is low and gray and loose and seems to hang. There's something baggy about the sky.
David Foster Wallace
#62. I've turned over a new leaf. On TV, Kenny Wallace said I was a pessimist after Charlotte, so I got mad. Now I am so excited about coming back that I just can't stand it. I wish we were starting tomorrow and I'm going to win! That's the new me.
Mark Martin
#63. 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
#64. I turn now not to the Bible but to Wallace Stevens
R.S. Thomas
#65. My father's mood surrounded him like a field and affected any room he occupied, like an odor or a certain cast to the light.
David Foster Wallace
#66. Beauty is momentary in the mind
The fitful tracing of a portal; But in the flesh it is immortal. The body dies; the body's beauty lives. So evenings die, in their green going, A wave, interminably flowing.
Wallace Stevens
#67. Little Joe was still behind him. Eli could feel it. He wanted to look back, but he couldn't. The tears were too close. If he were Fancy, he'd turn around and kick and buck and moo and do just about anything to keep his calf near. But Eli wasn't Fancy; he was a farmer.
Sandra Neil Wallace
#68. 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
#69. Yeah, she must work round here. Lot of high class escorts i. this area. And traffic wardens, too. She's probably one or the other.
Danny Wallace
#71. It is love and friendship, the sanctity and celebration of our relationships, that not only support a good life, but create one. Through friendships, we spark and inspire one another's ambitions.
Wallace Stegner
#72. For reasons that are not well understood, war's codes are safer for most of us than love's.
David Foster Wallace
#73. It's been said that actions speak louder than words. Sometimes, it's what you don't say or do, that sends the loudest message.
Carlos Wallace
#75. It's not that words or human language stop having any meaning or relevance after you die, by the way.
David Foster Wallace
#76. David Foster Wallace: We sit around and bitch about how TV has ruined the audience for reading - when really all it's done is given us the really precious gift of making our job harder.
David Lipsky
#77. The drowned panic of not being able to ask questions or have any input into what somebody's saying is so awful it sort of dwarfs the pain.
David Foster Wallace
#78. Thy heart is good, Esther, good as thy mother's was; and I pray
it have not the fate of most good hearts
to be trampled upon
by the unmerciful and blind.
Lew Wallace
#79. As each person's sandal hits the pier, a sociolinguistic transformation from cruiser to tourist is effected.
David Foster Wallace
#80. This was my world: cold, tangled and distorted. -Keira
S.L. Wallace
#81. It's plausibly a case of any kind of system that's been under enormous silent pressure for some time, that when the system finally blows the accreted pressure's such that it's almost always a full-scale eruption.
David Foster Wallace
#82. A like N.B. that Ewell ends up inserting under the heading Biker is that every professional tattooist everybody who can remember getting their tattoos remembers getting them from was, from the sound of everybody's general description, a Biker.
David Foster Wallace
#84. That a person who did something for somebody's gratitude was more like a 2-D cutout image of a person than a bona fide person.
David Foster Wallace
#86. -the soul's certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer.
David Foster Wallace
#87. For me, art that's alive and urgent is about what it is to be a human being.
David Foster Wallace
#88. Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere Mary went, the lights became erratic.
David Foster Wallace
#89. I worked for Sarah Palin. I have the political staffer version of P.T.S.D., so whenever I hear that she's breaking her silence, my heart stops.
Nicolle Wallace
#90. When a man's stories are remembered, then he is immortal.
Daniel Wallace
#91. Do you think it's a coincidence that college is when many Americans do their most serious fucking and falling-down drinking and generally ecstatic DIonysian-type reveling? It's not.
David Foster Wallace
#92. No one can identify the uninformed until they voice their ignorance about a topic. Silence is a fool's best friend. Sadly, he is often too foolish to realize it.
Carlos Wallace
#93. Sometimes with the Palins, it's exactly what it looks like.
Nicolle Wallace
#94. 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
#95. While you are busy eyeing the progress of others, you lose sight of your own opportunities. Handle your own business and get your personal affairs in order. Paying too much attention to someone else's blessings will ultimately cost you your own.
Carlos Wallace
#96. It's well-known that an overkeen sense of obligation tends to afflict the congenitally nice.
David Foster Wallace
#97. The individual's right to pursue his own vision of the best ration of pleasure to pain: utterly sacrosanct.
David Foster Wallace
#98. 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
#99. I have no doubt that what we started has become a plague. Because - and that's a million years ago but we got caught up in the drama more than we caught up in going after the facts.
Mike Wallace
#100. Whether or not you agreed with the group's incendiary style, one thing most people will agree on: N.W.A had a deep, trans-formative and lasting effect on hip hop ideology.
Carlos Wallace
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
