David Foster Wallace Quotes

128 Sourced Quotes

We will, of course, without hesitation use art to parody, ridicule, debunk, or criticize ideologies.

David Foster Wallace
I have always tried to avoid talking to pretty girls, because pretty girls have a vicious effect on me in which every part of my brain is shut down except for the part that says unbelievably stupid things and the part that is aware that I am saying unbelievably stupid things.

David Foster Wallace
If Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it.

David Foster Wallace
It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again.

David Foster Wallace
Does somebody have an explanation why there's human flesh on the hall window upstairs?

David Foster Wallace
The desire for perfect release and the real-world impossibility of perfect, whenever-you-want-it release had together produced a tension they could no longer stand.

David Foster Wallace
Betraying her class and origin with the heartbreaking openness Joelle's always viewed as either terribly stupid or terribly brave

David Foster Wallace
No single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.

David Foster Wallace
The severing of an established connection is exponentially more painful than the rejection of an attempted connection.

David Foster Wallace
I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.

David Foster Wallace
Progressive liberals seem incapable of stating the obvious truth: that we who are well off should be willing to share more of what we have with poor people not for the poor people's sake but for our own; i.e., we should share what we have in order to become less narrow and frightened and lonely and self-centered people.

David Foster Wallace
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
Genuine pathological openness is about as seductive as Tourette's Syndrome.

David Foster Wallace
What teachers and the administration in that era never seemed to see was that the mental work of what they called daydreaming often required more effort and concentration than it would have taken simply to listen in class. Laziness is not the issue. It is just not the work dictated by the administration.

David Foster Wallace
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
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
It's probably hard to feel any sort of Romantic spiritual connection to nature when you have to make your living from it.

David Foster Wallace
In fact, the likeliest reason why so many of us care so little about politics is that modern politicians makes us sad, hurt us deep down in ways that are hard even to name, much less talk about.

David Foster Wallace
She wanted only tall smooth bottles whose labels spoke of Proof.

David Foster Wallace
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
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
When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces. The man who'd introduced them didn't much like either of them, though he acted as if he did, anxious as he was to preserve good relations at all times. One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one.

David Foster Wallace
These worst mornings with cold floors and hot windows and merciless light—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
Can the decision to be less selfish ever be anything other than a selfish decision?

David Foster Wallace
That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.

David Foster Wallace
Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.

David Foster Wallace
Who would die for this chance to be fed this death of pleasure with spoons, in their warm homes, alone, unmoving?

David Foster Wallace
True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world.

David Foster Wallace
In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.

David Foster Wallace
This appetite to choose death by pleasure if it is available to choose - this appetite of your people unable to choose appetites, this is the death.

David Foster Wallace