David Foster Wallace: Trending quotes

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David Foster Wallace: 370 quotes15 likes

“The severing of an established connection is exponentially more painful than the rejection of an attempted connection.”

David Foster Wallace book The Broom of the System

Source: The Broom of the System

“I'm screaming for help and everybody's acting as if I'm singing Ethel Merman covers…”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

“There are secrets within secrets, though--always.”

David Foster Wallace book The Pale King

Source: The Pale King

“The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.”

David Foster Wallace book Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

Source: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

“The most dangerous thing about an academic education is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract thinking instead of simply paying attention to what’s going on in front of me.”

David Foster Wallace

Source: 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

“She had a brainy girls discomfort about her own beauty and its effects on folks.”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

“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

“She took a sort of abject pride in her mecilessness toward herself.”

David Foster Wallace book Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

Source: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

“There are very few innocent sentences in writing.”

David Foster Wallace

“This is water.”

David Foster Wallace

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

“… loneliness is not a function of solitude.”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

“Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T true is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it.”

David Foster Wallace

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

“The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at theduring the first eight pages.”

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

Source: Girl With Curious Hair

“Worship your body, beauty, and sexual allure and you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.”

David Foster Wallace

“We are not dead but asleep, dreaming of ourselves.”

David Foster Wallace book The Pale King

Source: The Pale King

“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 book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest (1996)
Context: 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.

“That what appears to be egoism so often isn't.”

David Foster Wallace book The Pale King

Source: The Pale King

“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