David Foster Wallace Quotes

Quotes about:

• If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

  David Foster Wallace

  Real, Grieving, Skeletons

  "'Plain Old Untrendy Troubles and Emotions'". www.theguardian.com. September 19, 2008.

  30 Copy quote

• You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.

  David Foster Wallace

  Life, Thinking, People

  "Infinite Jest". Book by David Foster Wallace, February 1, 1996.

  27 Copy quote

• Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.

  David Foster Wallace

  Bipolar, Secret, Different

  49 Copy quote

• The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.

  David Foster Wallace

  Inspirational, Truth, Freedom

  "Infinite Jest". Book by David Foster Wallace, February 1, 1996.

  37 Copy quote
• 

  If your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything.

  David Foster Wallace

  Motivational, Perfectionism, Fidelity

  59 Copy quote

• Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

  David Foster Wallace

  Worship You, Choices, Yahweh

  "'Plain Old Untrendy Troubles and Emotions'". www.theguardian.com. September 19, 2008.

  17 Copy quote

• Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

  David Foster Wallace

  Mean, Exercise, Thinking

  "This Is Water". David Foster Wallace's commencement speech at Kenyon College, www.youtube.com. May 21, 2005.

  28 Copy quote

• The man who knows his limitations, has none.

  David Foster Wallace

  Men, Knows, Limitation

  David Foster Wallace (2011). “Infinite Jest”, p.66, Hachette UK

  5 Copy quote

• God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I’m not crazy about.

  David Foster Wallace

  Crazy, Style, Laid Back

  9 Copy quote

• It takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak.

  David Foster Wallace

  Personal Courage, Infinite Jest, Weak

  "Infinite Jest". Book by David Foster Wallace, February 1, 1996.

  16 Copy quote

• No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.

  David Foster Wallace

  Struggle, Home, Journey

  David Foster Wallace (2005). “Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays”, p.38, Hachette UK

  20 Copy quote

• If you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do it

  David Foster Wallace

  Jobs, Children, Thinking

  19 Copy quote

• If you spend enough time reading or writing, you find a voice, but you also find certain tastes. 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 when that happens, reading those writers ... becomes a source of unbelievable joy. It’s like eating candy for the soul. 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

  Reading, Writing, Hard Times

  37 Copy quote

• Two young salmon are swimming along one day. As they do, they are passed by a wiser, older fish coming the other way. The wiser fish greets the two as he passes, saying, "Morning boys, how's the water?" The other two continue to swim in silence for a little while, until the first one turns to the other and asks, "What the hell is water?"

  David Foster Wallace

  Morning, Swimming, Boys

  14 Copy quote

• How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.

  David Foster Wallace

  Understanding, Being Weird, Odd

  53 Copy quote

• In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

  David Foster Wallace

  Worship You, Choices, Atheism

  "'Plain Old Untrendy Troubles and Emotions'". www.theguardian.com. September 19, 2008.

  44 Copy quote

• The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.

  David Foster Wallace

  Inspirational, Graduation, Freedom

  "David Foster Wallace's Kenyon Commencement Speech" by Carolyn Kellogg, latimesblogs.latimes.com. September 19, 2008.

  29 Copy quote

• 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

  Home, Reality, Voting

  "Up, Simba!". Essay by David Foster Wallace, September 2000.

  40 Copy quote

• True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world.

  David Foster Wallace

  Cheer, Exercise, Years

  David Foster Wallace (2011). “The Pale King”, p.19, Penguin UK

  35 Copy quote

• You don't have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness ... has to do with angst about death, the recognition that I'm going to die, and die very much alone, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily on without me.

  David Foster Wallace

  Loneliness, Writing, Thinking

  50 Copy quote

• I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.

  David Foster Wallace

  Inspirational, Reading, Book

  David Foster Wallace (2011). “Infinite Jest”, p.16, Hachette UK

  90 Copy quote

• 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

  Life, Differences, People

  David Foster Wallace (2012). “Consider The Lobster: Essays and Arguments”, p.103, Hachette UK

  56 Copy quote

• ...logical validity is not a guarantee of truth.

  David Foster Wallace

  Guarantees, Infinite Jest, Logical

  David Foster Wallace (2011). “Infinite Jest”, p.145, Hachette UK

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• 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. This is hard. ... How promising you are as a Student of the Game is a function of what you can pay attention to without running away.

  David Foster Wallace

  Running, Games, Broken

  David Foster Wallace (2011). “Infinite Jest”, p.128, Hachette UK

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• This story ["The Depressed Person"] was the most painful thing I ever wrote. It's about narcissism, which is a part of depression. The character has traits of myself. I really lost friends while writing on that story, I became ugly and unhappy and just yelled at people. The cruel thing with depression is that it's such a self-centered illness - Dostoevsky shows that pretty good in his "Notes from Underground". The depression is painful, you're sapped/consumed by yourself; the worse the depression, the more you just think about yourself and the stranger and repellent you appear to others.

  David Foster Wallace

  Writing, Character, Thinking

  Translation of the Zeit Online interview, www.thehowlingfantods.com. January 26, 2007.

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