33 David Foster Wallace Quotes
David Foster Wallace was born in February 1962. He was a writer and author of a handful of novels and countless essays. He is also a pontiff for English and creative writing. He is most known for the classic novel “Infinite Jest”. He passed away in 2008 at a rather not-long ripe age of 46 but it seems his life isn’t over as he has continued to live in the works of his hand(writing) and it is easy to relive his life through these. Here are tens of David Foster Wallace Quotes to remind you of the genius that was.
David Foster Wallace Quotes
“I’m a typical American, half of me is dying to give myself away and the other half is continually rebelling.”
“You get someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there’s a dog.”
“Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody’s ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.” A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
“I am fortunately an entirely handsome devil and appear even younger than twenty-nine. I look like a clean-cut youth, a boy next door, and a good egg, and my mother stated at one time that I have the face of a heaven’s angel.”
“That what appears to be egoism so often isn’t.”
“My worst character flaw that I’m conscious of is that I tend to think my way into circles instead of resolving anything. It’s paralyzing and boring for people around me.”
“It’s all very confusing. I think I’m very honest and candid, but I’m also proud of how honest and candid I am — so where does that put me?”
“She took a sort of abject pride in her mercilessness toward herself.”
“There are very few innocent sentences in writing.”
“I think it’s easy to stop smoking; it’s just hard not to commit a felony after you stop.”
“Infinite Jest not only says that being human is hard work; it makes us work hard. It not only suggests we put ourselves in service to something larger than ourselves; it is one of those larger somethings. That’s its rhetorical genius, and is how Wallace gets his self-help “to fly at such a high altitude.”
“Yes, I’m paranoid — but am I paranoid enough?”
“You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.”
“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”
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“She committed suicide by putting her extremities down the garbage disposal-first one arm and then, kind of miraculously if you think about it, the other arm.”
“Worship your body, beauty, and sexual allure and you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.”
“Sarcasm and jokes were often the bottles in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them.”
“How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.”
“To be, in a word, unborable… It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.”
“It is named the “Web” for good reason.”
“And although I played along with him for a while so as not to prick his bubble, inside I felt pretty bleak indeed, because now I knew that he was going to be just as pliable and credulous as everyone else, he didn’t appear to have anything close to the firepower I’d need to give me any hope of getting helped out of the trap of fraudulence and unhappiness I’d constructed for myself.”
“There are secrets within secrets, though–always.”
“The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the wall, during the first eight pages.”
“Everything I’ve ever let go of had claw marks on it”
“All I’m saying is that it’s shortsighted to blame TV. It’s simply another symptom. TV didn’t invent our aesthetic childishness here any more than the Manhattan Project invented aggression.”
“Every love story is a ghost story.”
“The severing of an established connection is exponentially more painful than the rejection of an attempted connection.”
“Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.”
“I think, today’s irony ends up saying: ‘How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.’ ”
“What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.”
“I do things like get in a taxi and say, ‘The library, and step on it.’”
“Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move.”
“I had kind of a midlife crisis at twenty which probably doesn’t augur well for my longevity.”
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