Real Quotes by David Foster Wallace

20 Real quotes by David Foster Wallace

All Real quotes David Foster Wallace’s page

David Foster Wallace had a knack for turning the banal into something profound. Across twenty passages, his voice oscillates between earnestness and irony, inviting readers to see the hidden layers of the world we often overlook.

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Boo, I think I no longer believe in monsters as faces in the floor or feral infants or vampires or whatever. I…

David Foster Wallace

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Real leaders are people who “help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and…

David Foster Wallace

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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

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Hal Incandenza has an almost obsessive dislike for deLint, whom he tells Mario he sometimes cannot quite believe is even real, and…

David Foster Wallace

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One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more…

David Foster Wallace

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The first time I lay actual eyes on the real David Lynch on the set of his movie, he's peeing on a…

David Foster Wallace

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Some words have to be explicitly uttered, Lenore. Only by actually uttering certain words does one really DO what one SAYS. 'Love'…

David Foster Wallace

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At root, vulgar just means popular on a mass scale. It is the semantic opposite of pretentious or snobby. It is humility…

David Foster Wallace

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An ad that pretends to be art is -- at absolute best -- like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because…

David Foster Wallace

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If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough,…

David Foster Wallace

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The real irony is that the view of infinity as some forbidden zone or road to insanity - which view was very…

David Foster Wallace

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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…

David Foster Wallace

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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

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The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death. It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing…

David Foster Wallace

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Hear this or not, as you will. Learn it now, or later -- the world has time. Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy,…

David Foster Wallace

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The truth is that the heroism of your childhood entertainments was not true valor. It was theatre. The grand gesture, the moment…

David Foster Wallace

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Literary fiction and poetry are real marginalized right now. There's a fallacy that some of my friends sometimes fall into, the ol'…

David Foster Wallace

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TV's "real" agenda is to be "liked," because if you like what you're seeing, you'll stay tuned. TV is completely unabashed about…

David Foster Wallace

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And meteorologists have nothing to tell people in Philo, who know perfectly well that the real story is that to the west,…

David Foster Wallace

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You have wondered, perhaps, why all real accountants wear hats? They are today's cowboys. As will you be. Riding the American range.…

David Foster Wallace

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More by David Foster Wallace

“I felt more solidly composed, now that I was horizontal. I was impossible to knock down.”

David Foster Wallace

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“We all have our little solipsistic delusions, ghastly intuitions of utter singularity: that we are the only one in the house who ever fills…

David Foster Wallace

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“It's no accident that in a bureaucracy getting fired is called 'termination,' as in ontological erasure.”

David Foster Wallace

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Footnote: 79) The anchor is gigantic and must weigh a hundred tons, and -- delightfully -- it really is anchor-shaped, i.e. the same shape…

David Foster Wallace

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“The paradoxical intercourse of audience and celebrity. The suppressed awareness that the whole reason ordinary people found celebrity fascinating was that they were not,…

David Foster Wallace

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“I am coming to see that the sensation of the worst nightmares, a sensation that can be felt asleep or awake, is identical to…

David Foster Wallace

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“He cranks the condo’s AC way down at night and still most mornings wakes up soaked, fetally curled, entombed in that kind of psychic…

David Foster Wallace

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“To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we…

David Foster Wallace

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“If you’re subjected to enough great salesmen and salespitches and marketing concepts for long enough—like from your earliest Saturday-morning cartoons, let’s say—it is only…

David Foster Wallace