David Foster Wallace Quotes (185 quotes)

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The Broom of the System

David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace: 185 quotes15 likes

Famous David Foster Wallace Quotes

“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

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

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest (1996)

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

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

“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?”

David Foster Wallace

Source: This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

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

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

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

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

David Foster Wallace Quotes about thinking

“If, by the virtue of charity or the circumstance of desperation, you ever chance to spend a little time around a Substance-recovery halfway facility like Enfield MA’s state-funded Ennet House, you will acquire many exotic new facts…That certain persons simply will not like you no matter what you do. That sleeping can be a form of emotional escape and can with sustained effort be abused. That purposeful sleep-deprivation can also be an abusable escape. That you do not have to like a person in order to learn from him/her/it. That loneliness is not a function of solitude. That logical validity is not a guarantee of truth. That it takes effort to pay attention to any one stimulus for more than a few seconds. That boring activities become, perversely, much less boring if you concentrate intently on them. That if enough people in a silent room are drinking coffee it is possible to make out the sound of steam coming off the coffee. That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack. That concentrating intently on anything is very hard work. That 99% of compulsive thinkers’ thinking is about themselves; that 99% of this self-directed thinking consists of imagining and then getting ready for things that are going to happen to them; and then, weirdly, that if they stop to think about it, that 100% of the things they spend 99% of their time and energy imagining and trying to prepare for all the contingencies and consequences of are never good. In short that 99% of the head’s thinking activity consists of trying to scare the everliving shit out of itself. That it is possible to make rather tasty poached eggs in a microwave oven. That some people’s moms never taught them to cover up or turn away when they sneeze. That the people to be the most frightened of are the people who are the most frightened. That it takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak. That no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable. That other people can often see things about you that you yourself cannot see, even if those people are stupid. That having a lot of money does not immunize people from suffering or fear. That trying to dance sober is a whole different kettle of fish. That different people have radically different ideas of basic personal hygiene. That, perversely, it is often more fun to want something than to have it. That if you do something nice for somebody in secret, anonymously, without letting the person you did it for know it was you or anybody else know what it was you did or in any way or form trying to get credit for it, it’s almost its own form of intoxicating buzz. That anonymous generosity, too, can be abused. That it is permissible to want. That everybody is identical in their unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else. That this isn’t necessarily perverse. That there might not be angels, but there are people who might as well be angels.”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Infinite Jest (1996)

“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.”

David Foster Wallace

Source: This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

“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.”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

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

David Foster Wallace

“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.”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

“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.”

David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace Quotes about people

“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

Essays
Source: Kenyon College Commencement Speech, April 21, 2005, published as This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life.

“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.”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

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

David Foster Wallace

Source: Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

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

David Foster Wallace

Source: Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

“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.”

David Foster Wallace

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

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

David Foster Wallace: Trending quotes

“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

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

David Foster Wallace book Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

Source: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

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

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

David Foster Wallace Quotes

“Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”

David Foster Wallace

An Interview by Larry McCaffery
Essays
Variant: I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

“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 book The Pale King

Source: The Pale King

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

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

“… 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.”

David Foster Wallace

Source: Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

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

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Variant: 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.
Source: Infinite Jest (1996)

“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.”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

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

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

“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.”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

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

David Foster Wallace book The Pale King

Source: The Pale King (2011)

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

David Foster Wallace

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

David Foster Wallace

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

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

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

David Foster Wallace

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

David Foster Wallace book A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
Essays
Context: I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture — a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It’s maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it’s not these things, quite. It’s more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I’m small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It’s wanting to jump overboard.

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

David Foster Wallace book Consider the Lobster

Big Red Son, p. 9
Consider the Lobster (2007)
Context: Nor let us forget Vegas's synecdoche and beating heart. It's kitty-corner from Bally's: Caesar's Palace. The granddaddy. As big as 20 walmarts end to end. Real marble and fake marble, carpeting you can pass out on without contusion, 130,000 square feet of casion alone. Domed ceilings, clerestories, barrel vaults. 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.”

David Foster Wallace

“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.”

David Foster Wallace

Source: A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

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

David Foster Wallace

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

David Foster Wallace

“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").”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

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

David Foster Wallace book Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

Source: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

“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

Variant: The true thoughts that go on inside us are 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 us at any given instant.
Source: Oblivion

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

David Foster Wallace

“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.”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

“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.”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

“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”

David Foster Wallace book The Pale King

Source: The Pale King

“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.”