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David Foster Wallace Quotes
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David Foster Wallace was an American writer and university instructor of English and creative writing. His novel Infinite Jest was listed by Time magazine as one of the hundred best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005. His last novel, The Pale King , was a final selection for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2012.

The Los Angeles Times book reviewer David Ulin called Wallace "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last twenty years". Wallace's works have influenced writers such as Dave Eggers, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen, Elizabeth Wurtzel, George Saunders, Rivka Galchen, Matthew Gallaway, David Gordon, Darin Strauss, Charles Yu, and Deb Olin Unferth.



✵ 21. February 1962 – 12. September 2008   •   Other names دايفيد والاس
David Foster Wallace photo
David Foster Wallace: 185   quotes 15   likes

David Foster Wallace Quotes

“Severity is in the eye of the sufferer, it says. Pain is pain.”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Infinite Jest (1996)

Pain , Suffering

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i. e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames. Yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don‘t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Infinite Jest (1996)

Life , Death , People , Fear

“There is something inescapably bovine about an American tourist in motion as part of a group. A certain greedy placidity about them. Us, rather. In port we automatically become Peregrinator americanusy Die Lumpenamerikaner.”

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

The Ugly Ones.
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
Essays

Parting

“A Democratic Spirit is one that combines rigor and humility, i. e., passionate conviction plus sedulous respect for the convictions of others. As any American knows, this is a very difficult spirit to cultivate and maintain, particularly when it comes to issues you feel strongly about. Equally tough is a D. S.'s criterion of 100 percent intellectual integrity--you have to be willing to look honestly at yourself and your motives for believing what you believe, and do it more or less continually.”

David Foster Wallace

"Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage." Harper's Magazine, April 2001.
Essays

Feeling , Motivation , Passion

“An ad that pretends to be art is — at absolute best — like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what's sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill's real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.”

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

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
Essays

Smile , Art , Feeling , Perfection

“After a few weeks of this she'd spend a whole day weeping, beating at herself as if on fire.”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Infinite Jest (1996)

“Then Thursday Coyle had his left wrist tied to his right ankle and was still beating this new kid Stockhausen until Schtitt sent Tex Watson down to tell him to knock it off.”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Infinite Jest (1996)

“In some respects all this variety is probably good, productive of difference and dialogue and so on. But it can also be confusing and stressful for the average citizen. Short of signing on to a particular mass ideology and patronizing only those partisan news sources that ratify what you want to believe, it is increasingly hard to determine which sources to pay attention to and how exactly to distinguish real information from spin.”

David Foster Wallace

"Host: Deep into the mercenary world of take-no-prisoners political talk radio." The Atlantic, April 2005.
Essays

“More than any other mass medium, radio enjoys a captive audience—if only because so many of the listeners are driving—but in a major market there are dozens of AM stations to listen to, plus of course FM and satellite radio, and even a very seductive and successful station rarely gets more than a five or six percent audience share.”

David Foster Wallace

"Host: Deep into the mercenary world of take-no-prisoners political talk radio." The Atlantic, April 2005.
Essays

Success

“And I submit that this is what the real, no-shit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about. How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.”

David Foster Wallace

Kenyon College Commencement Speech.
Essays

Dead , Nature , Art , Education

“Since we all breathe, all the time, it is amazing what happens when someone else directs you how and when to breathe. And how vividly someone with no imagination whatsoever can see what he’s told is right there, complete with banister and rubber runners, curving down and rightward into a darkness that recedes before you.”

David Foster Wallace book The Pale King

The Pale King (2011)

Imagination , Time

“Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A. M. heat: shattercane, lamb’s-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek. An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak’s thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day. A sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid and still as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.”

David Foster Wallace book The Pale King

The Pale King (2011)

Tree , Time , Business , Past

“The idea was to have the accident and whatever explosion and fire was involved occur someplace isolated enough that no one else would see it, so that there would be as little an aspect of performance to the thing as I could manage and no temptation to spend my last few seconds trying to imagine what impressions the sight and sound of the impact might make on someone watching. I was partly concerned that it might be spectacular and dramatic and might look as if the driver was trying to go out in as dramatic a way as possible. This is the sort of shit we waste our lives thinking about.”

David Foster Wallace

"Good Old Neon", Oblivion: Stories
Short stories

Imagination , Thinking , Way , Idea

“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 book Infinite Jest

Infinite Jest (1996)

Light , Sleep , Soul