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David Foster Wallace

74 quotes

“What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love? What if the temple comes to Mohammed? What if you just love? without deciding? You just do: you see her and in that instant are lost to sober account-keeping and cannot choose but to love?”
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My chest bumps like a dryer with shoes in it.”
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Severity is in the eye of the sufferer, it says. Pain is pain.”
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“After a few weeks of this she'd spend a whole day weeping, beating at herself as if on fire.”
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Betraying her class and origin with the heartbreaking openness Joelle's always viewed as either terribly stupid or terribly brave”
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are no choices without personal freedom, Buckeroo. It's not us who are dead inside. These things you find so weak and contemptible in us - these are just the hazards of being free”
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“'You know what your problem is, Hallie?' 'I have just one problem?'”
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1962–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier.”
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1962–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.”
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That everyone is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else. That this isn't necessarily perverse.”
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1962–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A large percentage of bright young men and women locate the impetus behind their career choice in the belief that they are fundamentally different from the common run of man, unique and in certain crucial ways superior, more as it were central, meaningful—what else could explain the fact that they themselves have been at the exact center of all they've experienced for the whole 20 years of their conscious lives?—and that they can and will make a difference in their chosen field simply by the fact of their unique and central presence to it...”
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.”
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1962–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.”
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1962–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. With kitchen tools, usually sometimes wire cutters. In answer to the obvious question, surviving patients most often report that their sexual urges had become a source of intolerable conflict and anxiety. The desire for perfect release and the real-world impossibility of perfect, whenever-you-want-it release had together produced a tension they could no longer stand.”
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A city that pretends to be nothing but what it is, an enormous machine of exchange - of spectacle for money, of sensation for money, of money for more money, of pleasure for whatever be tomorrow's abstract cost.”
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nor let us forget Vegas's synecdoche and beating heart. It's kitty-corner from Bally's: Caesar's Palace. The granddaddy. As big as 20 walmarts end to end. Real marble and fake marble, carpeting you can pass out on without contusion, 130,000 square feet of casion alone. Domed ceilings, clerestories, barrel vaults. In Caesars Palace is America conceived as a new kind of Rome: conqueror of its own people. An empire of self.”
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Not unlike urban gangs, police, carnival workers and certain other culturally marginalized guilds, the US porn industry is occluded and insular in a way that makes it seem like high school.”
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui—these are the true hero’s enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real.”
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every love story is a ghost story.”
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.”
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The assumption that everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.”
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1962–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“'Tax Law is like the world's biggest chess game with all sorts of weird conundrums about ethics and civics and consent of the governed built in. For me, it's a bit like math. I have no talent for it but find it still erotically interesting.'”
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The lonely, like [fiction writers], love one-way watching. For lonely people are usually lonely not because of hideous deformity or odor or obnoxiousness—in fact there exist today social and support groups for persons with precisely these features. Lonely people tend rather to be lonely because they decline to bear the emotional costs associated with being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.”
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And I'm not saying that television is vulgar and dumb because the people who compose Audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.”
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit "I don’t really mean what I’m saying." So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: "How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.”
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture — a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It’s maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it’s not these things, quite. It’s more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I’m small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It’s wanting to jump overboard.”
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1962–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. The Ugly Ones.”
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How long has it been since you did Absolutely Nothing? I know exactly how long it's been for me. I know how long it's been since I had every need met choicelessly from someplace outside me, without my having to ask or even acknowledge that I needed. And that time I was floating, too, and the fluid was salty, and warm but not too-, and if I was conscious at all I'm sure I felt dreadless, and was having a really good time, and would have sent postcards to everyone wishing they were here.”
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war. The human beauty we’re talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.”
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Federer as Religious Experience, New York Times, August 20, 2006
“Can the decision to be less selfish ever be anything other than a selfish decision?”
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1962–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 integrityyou 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 (1962–2008) first seen 2001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage (Harper's Magazine, April 2001.)
“Almost anyone who loves tennis and follows the men's tour on television has, over the last few years, had what might be termed Federer moments. These are times, watching the young Swiss at play, when the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see if you're OK”
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The John Ziegler Show is the first local, nonsyndicated late-night program that KFI has aired in a long time. It's something of a gamble for everyone involved. Ten o'clock to one qualifies as late at night in southern California, where hardly anything reputable's open after nine.”
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Host: Deep into the mercenary world of take-no-prisoners political talk radio." The Atlantic, April 2005.
“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 (1962–2008) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Host: Deep into the mercenary world of take-no-prisoners political talk radio." The Atlantic, April 2005.
“John Ziegler, who is a talk-radio host of unflagging industry, broad general knowledge, mordant wit, and extreme conviction, makes a particular specialty of media criticism.”
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Host: Deep into the mercenary world of take-no-prisoners political talk radio." The Atlantic, April 2005.
“The fact of the matter is that it is not John Ziegler's job to be responsible, or nuanced, or to think about whether his on-air comments are productive or dangerous, or cogent, or even defensible. That is not to say that the host would not defend his "we're better"—strenuously—or that he does not believe it's true. It is to say that he has exactly one on-air job, and that is to be stimulating.”
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Host: Deep into the mercenary world of take-no-prisoners political talk radio." The Atlantic, April 2005.
“KFI's John Ziegler is not a journalist — he is an entertainer. Or maybe it's better to say that he is part of a peculiar, modern, and very popular type of news industry, one that manages to enjoy the authority and influence of journalism without the stodgy constraints of fairness, objectivity, and responsibility that make trying to tell the truth such a drag for everyone involved. It is a frightening industry, though not for any of the simple reasons most critics give.”
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Host: Deep into the mercenary world of take-no-prisoners political talk radio." The Atlantic, April 2005.
“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 (1962–2008) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Host: Deep into the mercenary world of take-no-prisoners political talk radio." The Atlantic, April 2005.
“Whatever the social effects of talk radio or the partisan agendas of certain hosts, it is a fallacy that political talk radio is motivated by ideology. It is not. Political talk radio is a business, and it is motivated by revenue. The conservatism that dominates today's AM airwaves does so because it generates high Arbitron ratings, high ad rates, and maximum profits.”
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Host: Deep into the mercenary world of take-no-prisoners political talk radio." The Atlantic, April 2005.
“For obvious reasons, critics of political talk radio concern themselves mainly with the programs' content. Talk station management, on the other hand, tends to think of content as a subset of personality, of how stimulating a given host is.”
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Host: Deep into the mercenary world of take-no-prisoners political talk radio." The Atlantic, April 2005.
“Hosting talk radio is an exotic, high-pressure gig that not many people are fit for, and being truly good at it requires skills so specialized that many of them don't have names.”
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Host: Deep into the mercenary world of take-no-prisoners political talk radio." The Atlantic, April 2005.
“KFI's spot load is an instance of the kind of multivariable maximization problem that M.B.A. programs thrive on. It is obviously in the station's financial interest to carry just as high a volume of ads as it can without hurting ratings—the moment listeners begin turning away from KFI because of too many commercials, the Arbitron numbers go down, the rates charged for ads have to be reduced, and profitability suffers.”
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Host: Deep into the mercenary world of take-no-prisoners political talk radio." The Atlantic, April 2005.