David Foster Wallace Quotes

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

“… logical validity is not a guarantee of truth.”

“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?”

“I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.”

“The man who knows his limitations, has none.”

“Learning how to think' really means learning how to exercise some control over how & what you think. It means being conscious & aware enough to choose what you pay attention to & to choose how you construct meaning from experience.”

“I read,' I say. 'I study and read. I bet I've read everything you've read. Don't think I haven't. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.”

“I don't think writers are anythan other people. I think they may be more compelling in their stupidity, or in their.”

“she committed suicide by putting her extremities down the garbage disposal-first one arm and then, kind of miraculously if you think about it, the other arm.”

“What TV is extremely good at—and realize that this is "all it does"—is discerning what large numbers of people think they want, and supplying it.”

“That it is statistically easier for low-IQ people to kick an addiction than it is for high-IQ people… That boring activities become, perversely, much less boring if you concentrate intently on them.”

“To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.”

“Truly decent, innocent people can be taxing to be around.”

“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.”

“My bones are ringing the way sometimes people say their ears are ringing, I'm so tired.”

“There’s been time this whole time. You can’t kill time with your heart. Everything takes time.”

“It's weird to feel like you miss someone you're not even sure you know.”

“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.”

“… it takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak.”

“… we live in an era of terrible preoccupation with presentation and interpretation, one in which relations between who someone is and what he believes and how he "expresses himself" have been thrown into big time flux.”

“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”

“Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?"

"I give."

"You get someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog.”

“Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.”

“What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human […] is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.”

“How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.”

“The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.”

“Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself.”

“It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.”

“Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.”

“I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously.”

“In Caesars Palace is America conceived as a new kind of Rome: conqueror of its own people. An empire of self.”

“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.”

“Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.”

“I had kind of a midlife crisis at twenty which probably doesn’t augur well for my longevity”

“There's good self-consciousness, and then there's toxic, paralyzing, raped-by-psychic-Bedouins self-consciousness.”

“Te Occidere Possunt Sed Te Edere Non Possunt Nefas Est" ("They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier").”

“Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.”

“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.”

“You have decided being scared is caused mostly by thinking.”

“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.”

“The thing about people who are truly and malignantly crazy: their real genius is for making the people around them think theyare crazy. In military science this is called Psy-Ops, for your info.”

“To be, in a word, unborable…. It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish”

“I'd like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time, instead of having to go back in my head and enjoy them.”

“I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I'm not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I…”

“I have filled 3 Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me.”

“sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them.”

“… That no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.”

“Every love story is a ghost story.”

“The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.”

“Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui—these are the true hero’s enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real.”

“Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere Mary went, the lights became erratic.”

“Mediocrity is contextual.”

“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.”

“I'd tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear”

“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”

“The integrity of my sleep has been forever compromised, sir.”

“Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.”

“Why not? Why not? Why not not, then, if the best reasoning you can contrive is why not?”

“The sun like a sneaky keyhole view of hell.”

“… most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking.”

“God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I’m not crazy about.”

“Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move.”

“… morning is the soul's night.”

“You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice.”

“I am not what you see and hear.”

“Almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it.”