David Foster Wallace Quotes - Page 5

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In this country we're unprecedentedly safe, comfortable, and well fed, with more and better venues for stimulation. And yet if you were asked, 'Is this a happy or unhappy country?' you'd check the 'unhappy' box. We're living in an era of emotional poverty, which is something that serious drug addicts feel most keenly.

David Foster Wallace

Country, Emotional, Drug

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...loneliness is not a function of solitude.

David Foster Wallace

Loneliness, Solitude, Function

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

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The severing of an established connection is exponentially more painful than the rejection of an attempted connection.

David Foster Wallace

Rejection, Connections, Painful

David Foster Wallace (2004). “The Broom of the System: A Novel”, p.171, Penguin

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K--: 'When they say "I am my own person," "I do not need a man," "I am responsible for my own sexuality," they are actually telling you just what they want you to make them forget.

David Foster Wallace

Men, Want, Needs

David Foster Wallace (2012). “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men”, p.121, Hachette UK

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Worship power - you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever ore power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart - you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

David Foster Wallace

Stupid, Smart, Feelings

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

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Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have much harder, more tedious or painful lives than I do, overall.

David Foster Wallace

People, Bored, Frustrated

David Foster Wallace (2009). “This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life”, p.87, Hachette UK

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To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.

David Foster Wallace

Communication, Icons, People

David Foster Wallace (2005). “Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays”, p.157, Hachette UK

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But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars - compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things.

David Foster Wallace

Meaningful, Stars, Compassion

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

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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

Believe, Numbers, People

David Foster Wallace (2011). “Infinite Jest”, p.147, Hachette UK

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When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces. The man who'd introduced them didn't much like either of them, though he acted as if he did, anxious as he was to preserve good relations at all times. One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one.

David Foster Wallace

Home, Men, Twists

"Brief Interviews With Hideous Men". Book by David Foster Wallace, 1999.

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My own terror of appearing sentimental is so strong that I’ve decided to fight against it, some; but the terror is still there. . . . Do you identify with a distaste/fear about sentimentality? Do you agree that, past a certain line, such distaste can turn everything arch and sneering and too ironic? Or do you have your own set of abstract questions to drive yourself nuts with?

David Foster Wallace

Strong, Fighting, Past

"David Foster Wallace" by Deborah Treisman, www.newyorker.com. September 29, 2008.

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No single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.

David Foster Wallace

Inspirational, Powerful, Infinite Jest

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

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Fiction, poetry, music...these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.

David Foster Wallace

Loneliness, Fiction, Treated

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If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important - if you want to operate on your default-setting - then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying.

David Foster Wallace

Reality, Important, Want

"One Speech by This 90s Literary Giant Holds the Key to Ending Polarization in America" by Philip Perry, bigthink.com.

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It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most "familiarity" is meditated and delusive.

David Foster Wallace

Important, Way, Reminding

Interview With Larry McCaffery, www.dalkeyarchive.com. 1993.

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For me, boviscopophobia is an even stronger motive than semi-agoraphobia for staying on the ship when we're in port.

David Foster Wallace

Travel, Stronger, Bovine

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We all suffer alone in the real world. True empathy's impossible. But if a piece of fiction can alow us imaginatively to identify with a character's pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with their own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple.

David Foster Wallace

Pain, Real, Character

"How Emmanuel Carrère Reinvented Nonfiction" by Wyatt Mason, www.nytimes.com. March 2, 2017.

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You have to understand, writing a novel gets very weird and invisible-friend-from-childhood-ish. Then you kill that thing, which was never really alive except in your imagination, and you're supposed to go buy groceries and talk to people at parties and stuff.

David Foster Wallace

Party, Writing, People

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There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact - in its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of social equality for social equality itself - of vastly more help to conservatives and the US status quo than traditional SNOOT prescriptions ever were.

David Foster Wallace

Reform, Dialect, Facts

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I'm not afraid of new things. I'm just afraid of feeling alone even when there's somebody else there. I'm afraid of feeling bad. Maybe that's selfish, but it's the way I feel.

David Foster Wallace

Selfish, Feeling Alone, Feelings

David Foster Wallace (2014). “Girl With Curious Hair”, p.143, Hachette UK

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Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?

David Foster Wallace

Pain, Agnostic, Infinite Jest

David Foster Wallace (2011). “Infinite Jest”, p.39, Hachette UK

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To be a mass tourist, for me,...is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

David Foster Wallace

Tourists, Lines, Dimensions

David Foster Wallace (2005). “Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays”, p.157, Hachette UK

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....there is an ending [to Infinite Jest] as far as I'm concerned. Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an "end" can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame. If no such convergence or projection occured to you, then the book's failed for you.

David Foster Wallace

Book, Lines, Way

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There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship - be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles - is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

David Foster Wallace

Mother, Spiritual, Ethical Principles

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

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Think of the old cliché about ‘the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.’ This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head.

David Foster Wallace

Suicide, Thinking, Mind

"This Is Water: David Foster Wallace on Life" by Maria Popova, www.brainpickings.org. September 12, 2012.

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"Although the only way that I'm well known at Illinois State is that I am the "grammar Nazi." And so any student whose deployment of a semi-colon is not absolutely Mozart-esque knows that they're going to get a C in my class, and so my classes tend to have like four students in them. It's really a lot of fun."

- David Foster Wallace,

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David Foster Wallace

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Born: February 21, 1962
Died: September 12, 2008
Occupation: Novelist
Cite this Page: Citation

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