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David Foster Wallace Quotes

Total quotes: 45
“It's weird to feel like you miss someone you're not even sure you know.”
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Tagged: Missing, Missing Someone, Feeling, Weird, weird feeling, strange, someone you don't know, someone, Soul Mate, Person, Miss
“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, via Amazon
Tagged: Loneliness, Souls, lost souls, Life, Soul Mate
“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, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
Tagged: Antisocial Behavior, Distant person, Loneliness
“You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice.”
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Tagged: Love, Self & Identity, self awareness, self, Self Absorbed, love defines self
“Ghosts talking to us all the time — but we think their voices are our own thoughts.”
— David Foster Wallace, Global Wallace: David Foster Wallace and World Literature
Tagged: Doubting yourself, Human Consciousness
“People really do judge one another according to their use of language. Constantly.”
— David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays
Tagged: Judgement, Human Social Dynamics
“I’m so scared of dying without ever being really seen. Can you understand?”
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Tagged: Death, Acknowledgment of Others
“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.”
— David Foster Wallace, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace
Tagged: enjoying things in the moment, Present Moments, present, Nowness, Now vs. Then, the now
“You can be shaped, or you can be broken. There is not much in between. Try to learn. Be coachable. Try to learn from everybody, especially those who fail.”
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Tagged: broken, Learning, surviving
“...it takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak.”
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Tagged: Courage, Weak, Weakness, Irony, Opposites, courageous, Brave, Braveness, People, Life
“My life is unmanageable and I’d like to share it with you.”
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Tagged: Relationships, Trust, Life
“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Tagged: Truth, Honesty, self freedom
“Sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and hurt.”
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Tagged: Suffering, Hurting
“She was terrified of everything, and terrified to show it.”
— David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
Tagged: Identity & Self
“Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.”
— David Foster Wallace
Tagged: Letting Go, Awareness, Hardship, difficult
“I am not what you see and hear.”
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Tagged: strange, Ghost
“There are limits to what even interested persons can ask of each other.”
— David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays
Tagged: Limits, Conversation, How Deep Can We Talk?
“What would you do if you shouted "Victory for the Forces of Democratic freedom" every-time you came?”
— David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
“The quiet has a kind of menace. The whole cubular building seems to Hal to hold the tensed menace of a living thing that’s chosen to hold itself still.”
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Tagged: Quiet, Menace of Silence
“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Tagged: Identity, Your Uniqueness, What Makes Us Different, Beliefs, 107 Of The Greatest Single Sentences In Literature, Perfect Sentences
“Every time someone I know decides to terminate a pregnancy, I am required to believe simultaneously that she is doing the wrong thing and that she has every right to do it.”
— David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays
Tagged: Pro-Life, Pro-Choice, Abortion
“To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.”
— David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays
Tagged: Fandom, Icons, Famous, Fame, Famous People
“Like all good ad clichés, it manages to suggest everything and mean nothing.”
— David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays
Tagged: Advertising, Cliches
“THE AMERICAN ACADEMY of Emergency Medicine confirms it: Each year, between one and two dozen adult US males are admitted to ERs after having castrated themselves.”
— David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
Tagged: first lines of books, humor, fact
“American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.”
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Tagged: America, American Experience
“The horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.”
— David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays
Tagged: The Journey Is The Destination, Forever Fighting, Life, Struggle, It Never Ends
“The familiar panic at feeling misperceived is rising, and my chest bumps and thuds. I expend energy on remaining utterly silent in my chair, empty, my eyes two great pale zeros. People have promised to get me through this.”
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Tagged: what anxiety feels like, anxiety in literature, Panic, Feelings, Energy, Social Anxiety
“Talent is sort of a dark gift, that talent is its own expectation: it is there from the start and either lived up to or lost.”
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Tagged: Talent, Potential
“Almost always gotten on impulse, tattoos are vividly, chillingly permanent.”
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Tagged: Tattoos, Impulsive But Forever
“Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?”
— David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays
Tagged: Lobsters, Killing Things, Boiling Lobsters
“Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.”
— David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System: A Novel (Penguin Ink) (The Penguin Ink Series)
Tagged: first lines of books
“Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he's devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It's hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.”
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest: A Novel -- 20th Anniversary Edition
“You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place. It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again.”
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Tagged: This Is Human Life, Limits, Tragedy
“Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I’m bullshitting myself, morally speaking?”
— David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays
Tagged: Who Am I, Identity, Deep
“I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies.”
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest: A Novel
Tagged: first lines of books, Offices, Bodies
“Every love story is a ghost story.”
— David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
Tagged: Love, Love Stories, Nostalgia, Memories, Heartbreak
“You find certain writers who when they write, it makes your own brain voice like a tuning fork, and you just resonate with them … And I sometimes have a hard time understanding how people who don’t have that in their lives make it through the day.”
— David Foster Wallace, David Foster Wallace: How to Create a Life of Meaning and Awareness
Tagged: Writers, voice, Writing, Reading, Books, Novels, Authors
“Almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of 'psst' that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer.”
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Tagged: Destiny, Fate, Engineer
“Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care. What you wish to sing of as tragic love is an attachment not carefully chosen. Die for one person? This is a craziness. Persons change, leave, die, become ill. They leave, lie, go mad, have sickness, betray you, die. Your nation outlives you. A cause outlives you.”
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Tagged: Attachments, Bigger Than Your Self, Fanaticism
“Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties — all these chase away loneliness by making me forget…I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion — these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.”
— David Foster Wallace
Tagged: fiction, Loneliness, Writing, Reading
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