David Foster Wallace Quotes: 21

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

  Infinite Jest

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

  Infinite Jest

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

  Infinite Jest

• 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.

  This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

• Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?" "I give." "You get someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog.

  Infinite Jest

• 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 Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

• 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.

  A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

• Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.

  Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

• That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack. That concentrating on anything is very hard work.

  Infinite Jest

• Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere Mary went, the lights became erratic.

  Infinite Jest

• The integrity of my sleep has been forever compromised, sir.

• Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he's devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It's hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.

  Infinite Jest

• When a solipsist dies ... everything goes with him.

  Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

• There are very few innocent sentences in writing.

• Worship your body, beauty, and sexual allure and you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.

• 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.

• So tonight to shush you how about if I say I have administrative bones to pick with God, Boo. I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I'm not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I, Boo.

  Infinite Jest

• This is why they started us here so young: to give ourselves away before the age when the questions 'why' and 'to what' grow real beaks and claws.

  Infinite Jest

• How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?

  Infinite Jest

• We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately (...) To games or needles, to some other person.

  Infinite Jest

• What I know about auto racing could be inscribed with a dry Magic Marker on the lip of a Coke bottle.

  A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments