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David Foster Wallace Quotes

Total quotes: 28
“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
“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
“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
“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?
“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
“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
“A real leader is somebody who, because of his own particular power and charisma and example, is able to inspire people, with “inspire” being used here in a serious and non-cliché way. A real leader can somehow get us to do certain things that deep down we think are good and want to be able to do but usually can’t get ourselves to do on our own. It’s a mysterious quality, hard to define, but we always know it when we see it, even as kids. You can probably remember seeing it in certain really great coaches, or teachers, or some extremely cool older kid you “looked up to” (interesting phrase) and wanted to be just like. Some of us remember seeing the quality as kids in a minister or rabbi, or a scoutmaster, or a parent, or a friend’s parent, or a supervisor in a summer job. And yes, all these are “authority figures,” but it’s a special kind of authority.”
— David Foster Wallace
Tagged: Debbie Millman
“Progressive liberals seem incapable of stating the obvious truth: that we who are well off should be willing to share more of what we have with poor people not for the poor people’s sake but for our own; i.e., we should share what we have in order to become less narrow and frightened and lonely and self-centered people. No one ever seems willing to acknowledge aloud the thoroughgoing self-interest that underlies all impulses toward economic equality— especially not US progressives, who seem so invested in an image of themselves as Uniquely Generous and Compassionate and Not Like Those Selfish Conservatives Over There that they allow the conservatives to frame the debate in terms of charity and utility, terms under which redistribution seems far less obviously a good thing.”
— David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays
Tagged: Politics, Self-Intrest, Morality, Ethics
“A good muddy juice fills Joelle’s mouth with spit that’s as good as the juice, and her linen veil is drying and beginning once again comfortingly to flutter with her breath, and, perched alone and glanced at covertly by persons who don’t know they know her voice, she feels the desire to raise the veil before a mirror, to refine some of her purse’s untouched Material, raise the veil and set free the encaged rapacious thing inside to breathe the only uncloth’d gas it can stomach; she feels ghastly and sad; she looks like death, her mascara’s all over the place; no one can tell.”
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Tagged: Sadness, lonliness, Vices, Depression
“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?'

This is the freedom of real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think.  

None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death. The Capital T truth is about life before death. The real value of a real education has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over:


This is water.
This is water.”
— David Foster Wallace, This Is Water
Tagged: Philosophy, Psychology, The Person You'll Become
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