David Foster Wallace Quotes

128 Sourced Quotes

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

David Foster Wallace
They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier.

David Foster Wallace
'Tax Law is like the world's biggest chess game with all sorts of weird conundrums about ethics and civics and consent of the governed built in. For me, it's a bit like math. I have no talent for it but find it still erotically interesting.'

David Foster Wallace
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
What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love? What if the temple comes to Mohammed? What if you just love? without deciding? You just do: you see her and in that instant are lost to sober account-keeping and cannot choose but to love?

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

David Foster Wallace
I'd tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear

David Foster Wallace
Great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common. Both depend on what communication-theorists sometimes called "exformation," which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient.

David Foster Wallace
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
Almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it.

David Foster Wallace
What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.

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
I submit that tennis is the most beautiful sport there is and also the most demanding. It requires body control, hand-eye coordination, quickness, flat-out speed, endurance, and that weird mix of caution and abandon we call courage. It also requires smarts. Just one single shot in one exchange in one point of a high-level match is a nightmare of mechanical variables.

David Foster Wallace
I miss everyone. I can remember being young and feeling a thing and identifying it as homesickness, and then thinking well now that's odd, isn't it, because I was home, all the time. What on earth are we to make of that?

David Foster Wallace
That everyone is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else. That this isn't necessarily perverse.

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
I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on 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
They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier.
Te Occidere Possunt Sed Te Edere Non Possunt Nefas Est

David Foster Wallace
The individual's right to pursue his own vision of the best ration of pleasure to pain: utterly sacrosanct.

David Foster Wallace
But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention...it will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars-compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things.

David Foster Wallace
In reality, genuine epiphanies are extremely rare. In contemporary adult life maturation & acquiescence to reality are gradual processes. Modern usage usually deploys epiphany as a metaphor. It is usually only in dramatic representations, religious iconography, and the 'magical thinking' of children that insight is compressed to a sudden blinding flash.

David Foster Wallace
My whole life I've been a fraud. I'm not exaggerating. Pretty much all I've ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me in other people. Mostly to be liked or admired. It's a little more complicated than that, maybe. But when you come right down to it it's to be liked, loved. Admired, approved of, applauded, whatever. You get the idea.

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

David Foster Wallace
Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?

David Foster Wallace