Persons Quotes by David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.

— David Foster Wallace

Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.

— David Foster Wallace

You have decided being scared is caused mostly by thinking.

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.

— David Foster Wallace

It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.

— David Foster Wallace

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…

— David Foster Wallace

True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there…

— David Foster Wallace

I had, by thirteen, developed a sort of Taoist hubris about my ability to control via non-control.

— David Foster Wallace

There's good self-consciousness, and then there's toxic, paralyzing, raped-by-psychic-Bedouins self-consciousness.

— David Foster Wallace

There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves…

— David Foster Wallace

Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself.

— David Foster Wallace

I knew my limitations and the limitations of the courts I played on, and adjusted thusly. I was at my best in…

— David Foster Wallace

It was when I was the age where you can, as they say, "hear voices" without worrying that something is wrong with…

— David Foster Wallace

Kafka's evocations are, rather, unconscious and almost sub-archetypal, the little-kid stuff from which myths derive; this is why we tend to call…

— David Foster Wallace

This is not a matter of virtue-it's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free…

— David Foster Wallace

I felt, as I became a later and later bloomer, alienated not just from my own recalcitrant glabrous little body but in…

— David Foster Wallace

K--: 'When they say "I am my own person," "I do not need a man," "I am responsible for my own sexuality,"…

— David Foster Wallace

Most of the writers I know are weird hybrids. There's a strong streak of egomania coupled with extreme shyness. Writing's kind of…

— David Foster Wallace

The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component…

— David Foster Wallace

What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really…

— David Foster Wallace

Probably the most dangerous thing about college education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize…

— David Foster Wallace

Some persons can give themselves away to an ambitious pursuit and have that be all the giving-themselves-away-to-something they need to do. Though…

— David Foster Wallace

Is it possible really to love other people? If I’m lonely and in pain, everyone outside me is potential relief—I need them.…

— David Foster Wallace

Are we not all of us fanatics? I say only what you of the U.S.A. pretend you do not know. Attachments are…

— David Foster Wallace

Both destiny's kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person's basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e.…

— David Foster Wallace

Dostoevsky wrote fiction about identity, moral value, death, will, sexual vs. spiritual love, greed, freedom, obsession, reason, faith, suicide. And he did…

— David Foster Wallace

This story ["The Depressed Person"] was the most painful thing I ever wrote. It's about narcissism, which is a part of depression.…

— David Foster Wallace

The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams…

— David Foster Wallace

When I say or write something, there are actually a whole lot of different things I am communicating. The propositional content (i.e.,…

— David Foster Wallace

Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most…

— David Foster Wallace

The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.

— David Foster Wallace

I'd like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time, instead of having to go back in…

— David Foster Wallace

To be, in a word, unborable… It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally…

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

It's probably hard to feel any sort of Romantic spiritual connection to nature when you have to make your living from it.

— David Foster Wallace

The sound of wind had become, for me, silence. When it went away, I was left with the squeak of the blood…

— David Foster Wallace

I have heard upscale adult U.S. citizens ask the ship's Guest Relations Desk whether snorkeling necessitates getting wet...I now know the precise…

— David Foster Wallace

I never, even for a moment, doubted what they’d told me. This is why it is that adults and even parents can,…

— David Foster Wallace