Check out the best David Foster Wallace quotes that reflect his profound wisdom on life, love, depression, loneliness, and the human condition.
David Foster Wallace was an American novelist, essayist, and professor known for his groundbreaking contributions to contemporary literature.
He is one of the most influential writers of the last twenty years known for his innovative writing style, intellectual depth, and sharp wit.
His writings explore themes like the human condition, morality, addiction, and the struggles of contemporary society.
Wallace’s magnum opus, Infinite Jest (1996) made it to the list of ‘One of the hundred best English-language novels’ from 1923 to 2005.
His other notable works include “The Broom of the System” (1987) and “The Pale King” (2011). The latter, published posthumously, was a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist.
In addition to his novels, Wallace was a prolific essayist. His collections, such as “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” and “Consider the Lobster”, showcase his ability to explore diverse topics with humor, insight, and a keen observational eye.
Wallace had a lifelong struggle with depression and addiction for many years and tragically passed away by suicide in 2008 at the age of 46. His legacy endures through his literary achievements and continues to inspire readers worldwide.
Below are the most famous David Foster Wallace quotes that inspire you to think deeply, live with a purpose, and embrace the beauty of the human experience.
Top 10 David Foster Wallace Quotes
- “Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.” — David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace Quotes - “Logical validity is not a guarantee of truth.” — David Foster Wallace
Famous Quotes By David Foster Wallace - “The man who knows his limitations, has none.” — David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace Sayings - “Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.” — David Foster Wallace
- “It takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak.” — David Foster Wallace
Best David Foster Wallace Quotes - “The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.” — David Foster Wallace
Quotes From David Foster Wallace - “Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.” — David Foster Wallace
- “How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.” — David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace Quotations - “That no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.” — David Foster Wallace
- “You’ll stop worrying what others think about you when you realize how seldom they do.” — David Foster Wallace
Best David Foster Wallace Quotes
- “Every love story is a ghost story.” — David Foster Wallace
- “Stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.” — David Foster Wallace
- “It is often more fun to want something than to have it.” — David Foster Wallace
- “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.” — David Foster Wallace
- “Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.” — David Foster Wallace
- “If your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything.” — David Foster Wallace
- “This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn’t engage anybody.” — David Foster Wallace
- “Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” ― David Foster Wallace
- “I’d tell you all you want and more if the sounds I made could be what you hear.” ― David Foster Wallace
- “The interesting thing is why we’re so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.” — David Foster Wallace
- “Good writing isn’t a science. It’s an art, and the horizon is infinite. You can always get better.” — 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
- “You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.” — 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
- “Talent is sort of a dark gift, that talent is its own expectation: it is there from the start and either lived up to or lost.” — 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 my head and enjoy them.” ― David Foster Wallace
- “The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates.” — David Foster Wallace
Famous Quotes From David Foster Wallace
- “Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.” ― 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 nothing you cannot accomplish.” ― David Foster Wallace
- “Sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them.” ― David Foster Wallace
- “It’s got something to do with love. With having the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself that can love instead of the part that just wants to be loved.” — 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 to see or cheer. This is the world.” — David Foster Wallace
- “We’re all lonely for something we don’t know we’re lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we’ve never even met?” ― David Foster Wallace
- “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.” ― David Foster Wallace
- “There are no choices without personal freedom, Buckeroo. It’s not us who are dead inside. These things you find so weak and contemptible in us—these are just the hazards of being free.” ― David Foster Wallace
- “In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.” — 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 he believes and how he “expresses himself” have been thrown into big time flux.” — David Foster Wallace
- “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.” ― David Foster Wallace
- “It’s a very American illness, the idea of giving yourself away entirely to the idea of working in order to achieve some sort of brass ring that usually involves people feeling some way about you—I mean, people wonder why we walk around feeling alienated and lonely and stressed out.” ― David Foster Wallace
- “We all suffer alone in the real world. True empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow 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
- “There’s a kind of Ah-ha! Somebody at least for a moment feels about something or sees something the way that I do. It doesn’t happen all the time. It’s these brief flashes or flames, but I get that sometimes. I feel unalone—intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I’m in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry in a way that I don’t with other art.” — David Foster Wallace
- “Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties—all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name’s Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion—these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.” ― David Foster Wallace
Conclusion
What are your favorite David Foster Wallace quotes listed above (with images, pictures, and wallpapers)? If there is a quote that we’ve missed then let us know in the comments section below.
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