Time Quotes by David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

So which is the lie? Hard or soft? Silence or time?

— David Foster Wallace

“Over eighty-five percent of the time the subject accepts.”

— David Foster Wallace

“Insects all business all the time.”

— David Foster Wallace

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

— David Foster Wallace

“She used party as a verb several times.”

— David Foster Wallace

“The encaged and suicidal have a really hard time imagining anyone caring passionately about anything.”

— David Foster Wallace

“I mean, Tarantino is such a SHMUCK 90 percent of the time. But ten percent of the time, I've seen genius shining…

— 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

“There’s been time this whole time. You can’t kill time with your heart. Everything takes time.”

— David Foster Wallace

“... That no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.”

— David Foster Wallace

“Marathe was prepared to die violently at any time, which rendered him free to choose among emotions.”

— 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

Look, man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that…

— David Foster Wallace

Like so many other nerdy, disaffected young people of that time, I dreamed of becoming an 'artist', i.e., somebody whose adult job…

— David Foster Wallace

“He just sits there. I want to be like that. Able to just sit all quiet and pull life toward me, one…

— David Foster Wallace

America, as everybody knows, is a country of many contradictions, and a big contradiction for a long time has been between a…

— David Foster Wallace

The fact that the most powerful and significant connections in our lives are (at the time) invisible to us seems to me…

— David Foster Wallace

...we live in an era of terrible preoccupation with presentation and interpretation, one in which relations between who someone is and what…

— David Foster Wallace

“Which he said was the big lie they all bought that made doctors and standard therapy such a waste of time for…

— David Foster Wallace

“This is what people call a view. And you knew that from below you wouldn't look nearly so high overhead. You see…

— David Foster Wallace

If you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern,…

— David Foster Wallace

In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of…

— David Foster Wallace

“The fraudulence paradox was that the more time and effort you put into trying to appear impressive or attractive to other people,…

— David Foster Wallace

“I spent a lot of time as a volunteer in a nursing home in Amherst last summer. I was reading Dante's Divine…

— David Foster Wallace

“Workshop Hermeticism, fiction for which the highest praise involves the words 'competent,' 'finished,' 'problem-free,' fiction over which Writing-Program pre- and proscriptions loom…

— David Foster Wallace

“Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from…

— David Foster Wallace

John McEnroe...was arguably the best serve-and-volley man of all time, but then McEnroe was an exception to pretty much every predictive norm…

— David Foster Wallace

“Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and…

— David Foster Wallace

“If you spend enough time reading or writing, you find a voice, but you also find certain tastes. You find certain writers…

— David Foster Wallace

“...in real life I always seem to have a hard time winding up a conversation or asking somebody to leave, and sometimes…

— David Foster Wallace

“ *One clue that there’s something not quite real about sequential time the way you experience it is the various paradoxes of…

— David Foster Wallace

“That 99 of compulsive thinkers’ thinking is about themselves that 99 of this self-directed thinking consists of imagining and then getting ready…

— David Foster Wallace

“I say is someone in there?’ The voice is the young post-New formalist from Pittsburgh who affects Continental and wears an ascot…

— David Foster Wallace

“I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day.…

— David Foster Wallace

“Maybe it’s not metaphysics. Maybe it’s existential. I’m talking about the individual US citizen’s deep fear, the same basic fear that you…

— David Foster Wallace

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

“The reality is that dying isn’t bad, but it takes forever. And that forever is no time at all. I know that…

— David Foster Wallace

“Gentlemen, here is a truth: Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is… True heroism is…

— David Foster Wallace

“shall I spend much of your time pointing out the degree to which televisual values influence the contemporary mood of jaded weltschmerz,…

— David Foster Wallace