The Best Foster Wallace quotes

His eyes were holes in the world. — David Foster Wallace

And her eyes. I cannot say what color Lenore Beadsman’s eyes are; I cannot look at them; they are the sun to me. — David Foster Wallace

The drunk and the maimed both are dragged forward out of the arena like a boneless Christ, one man under each arm, feet dragging, eyes on the aether. — David Foster Wallace

Everyone should get at least one good look at the eyes of a man who finds himself rising toward what he wants to pull down to himself. — David Foster Wallace

You decide. You be the judge. It says You are welcome regardless of severity. Severity is in the eye of the sufferer, it says. Pain is pain. — David Foster Wallace

It’s like there’s some rule that real stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn’t happy. — David Foster Wallace

Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself. — David Foster Wallace

Who teaches your U.S.A. children how to choose their temple? What to love enough not to think two times? — David Foster Wallace

Every love story is a ghost story. — David Foster Wallace

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

There is no hatred in my love for you. Only a sadness I feel all the more strongly for my inability to explain or describe it. — David Foster Wallace

It would take an architect who could hate enough to feel enough to love enough to perpetrate the kind of special cruelty only real lovers can inflict. — David Foster Wallace

Tell them there are no holes for your fingers in the masks of men. Tell them how could you ever even hope to love what you can’t grab onto. — David Foster Wallace

Say the whole point of love is to try to get your fingers through the holes in the lover’s mask. To get some kind of hold on the mask, and who cares how you do it. — David Foster Wallace

Apeshit has rarely enjoyed so literal a denotation. — David Foster Wallace

Kid, sobriety’s like a hard–on; the minute you get it, you want to fuck with it. — David Foster Wallace

I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. — David Foster Wallace

Insects all business all the time. — David Foster Wallace

The encaged and suicidal have a really hard time imagining anyone caring passionately about anything. — David Foster Wallace

So which is the lie? Hard or soft? Silence or time? — David Foster Wallace

I am wonderful fun to talk to. I’m a consummate professional. People leave my parlor in states. You are here. It’s conversation–time. Shall we discuss Byzantine erotica? — David Foster Wallace

There’s been time this whole time. You can’t kill time with your heart. Everything takes time. — David Foster Wallace

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

He just sits there. I want to be like that. Able to just sit all quiet and pull life toward me, one forehead at a time. His name is supposedly Lyle. — David Foster Wallace

Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage. — David Foster Wallace

T]o really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help. — David Foster Wallace

Writing fiction takes me out of time. I sit down and the clock will not exist for me for a few hours. That’s probably as close to immortal as we’ll ever get. — David Foster Wallace

Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still. — David Foster Wallace

We are not dead but asleep, dreaming of ourselves. — David Foster Wallace

It’s so nice to be able to end a sentence with a preposition when it’s easier. — David Foster Wallace

As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing. — David Foster Wallace

Fiction’s about what it is to be a human being. — David Foster Wallace

Does somebody have an explanation why there’s human flesh on the hall window upstairs? — David Foster Wallace

It’s that he persists in the bizarre, adolescent belief that getting to have sex with whomever one wants whenever one wants to is a cure for human despair. — David Foster Wallace

It’s not that words or human language stop having any meaning or relevance after you die, by the way. — David Foster Wallace

The other half is to dramatize that we still ‘are’ human beings, now. Or can be. — 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

Believe what you want. I’m powerless over what you believe. — David Foster Wallace

I believe I want adult sanity, which seems to me the only unalloyed form of heroism available today. — David Foster Wallace

Rhythms are relations between what you believe and what you believed before. — David Foster Wallace

That God might regard the issue of whether you believe there’s a God or not as fairly low on his/her/its list of things s/he/it’s interested in re you. — David Foster Wallace

God might regard the issue of whether you believe there’s a God or not as fair low on his/her/its list of things s/he/it’s interested in re you. — David Foster Wallace

De Tocqueville’s thrust is that it’s in the democratic citizen’s nature to be like a leaf that doesn’t believe in the tree it’s part of. — David Foster Wallace

Certain sincerely devout and spiritually advanced people believe that the God of their understanding helps them find parking places and gives them advice on Mass. Lottery numbers. — David Foster Wallace

It’s weird to feel like you miss someone you’re not even sure you know. — David Foster Wallace

She regarded the things that were important to me as her enemy, not realizing that they were, in fact, the ‘me’ she seemed so jealously to covet. — David Foster Wallace

Irony tyrannizes us. All US irony is based on an implicit ‘I don’t really mean what I’m saying. — David Foster Wallace

Show me somebody who really knows what irony means and I’ll show you a bullshit artist. — David Foster Wallace

This American penchant for absolution via irony is foreign to them. — David Foster Wallace

I think, today’s irony ends up saying: ‘How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean. — David Foster Wallace

The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, ‘then’ what do we do? — David Foster Wallace

I think the main function of contemporary irony is to protect the speaker from being interpreted as naive or sentimental. — David Foster Wallace

Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever. — David Foster Wallace

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

There is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard’s vote. — David Foster Wallace

In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard’s vote. — David Foster Wallace

This is so American, man: either make something your god and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it. — David Foster Wallace

His own father told him that 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

One paradox of professional writing is that books written solely for money and/or acclaim will almost never be good enough to garner either. — David Foster Wallace