Top David Foster Wallace Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

David Foster Wallace Biography

David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008) was an American writer and university instructor in the disciplines of English and creative writing. His novel Infinite Jest (1996) was listed by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005. His last novel, The Pale King (2011), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2012.

Read about David Foster Wallace in Wikipedia

Random Authors

David Foster Wallace Quotes

I submit that tennis is the most beautiful sport there is and also the most demanding. It requires body control, hand-eye coordination, quickness, flat-out speed, endurance, and that weird mix of caution and abandon we call courage. It also requires smarts. Just one single shot in one exchange in one point of a high-level match is a nightmare of mechanical variables.

Beautiful, Point, Smart, Speed, Sports, Variables

The boy, who did everything well and with a natural unslumped grace the wraith himself had always lacked, and whom the wraith had been so terribly eager to see and hear and let him (the son) know he was seen and heard, the son had become a steadily more and more hidden boy, toward the wraith's life's end; and no one else in the wraith and the boy's nuclear family would see or acknowledge this, the fact that the graceful and marvelous boy was disappearing, right before their eyes. They looked but did not see his invisibility.

Boys, Everything, Eye, Grace, Son

In reality, genuine epiphanies are extremely rare. In contemporary adult life maturation & acquiescence to reality are gradual processes. Modern usage usually deploys epiphany as a metaphor. It is usually only in dramatic representations, religious iconography, and the 'magical thinking' of children that insight is compressed to a sudden blinding flash.

Children, Contemporary, Dramatic, Religious, Thinking

The assumption that you everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.

Assumption, Complacent, Disease, Everyone, Solipsism, World

Pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U. S. per se.

Ends, Gdp, Pleasure, Probably, Teleological

Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he's devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It's hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.

Certain, Doe, Generations, North, Way

. . . Genuine pathological openness is about as seductive as Tourette's Syndrome.

Genuine, Pathological, Seductive, Syndrome, Syndromes, Tourettes

The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home.

Attention, Home, Long, Pissed, Thinking

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.

Tourists, Lines, Dimensions, Inescapable, Dimension, Tourist

She took a sort of abject pride in her mecilessness toward herself.

Abject, Pride, Sort, Took, Toward

My worst character flaw that I'm conscious of is that I tend to think my way into circles instead of resolving anything. It's paralyzing and boring for people around me.

Boring, Character, Circles, Conscious, Thinking, Way

Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.

Doe, Feet, Girl, Lenore, Metalman

Are we not all of us fanatics? I say only what you of the U. S. A. pretend you do not know. Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care. What you wish to sing of as tragic love is an attachment not carefully chosen. Die for one person? This is a craziness. Persons change, leave, die, become ill. They leave, lie, go mad, have sickness, betray you, die. Your nation outlives you. A cause outlives you.

Attachment, Lie, Love Is, Lying, Outlives, Wish

Perhaps this is what it means to go mad: to be emptied and to be aware of the emptiness.

Aware, Emptied, Emptiness, Mad, Mean

Our attachments are our temple, what we worship, no? What we give ourselves to, what we invest with faith. . . . Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care.

Attachment, Care, Faith, Giving, Invest, Temple

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.

Art, Emotionally, Fiction, Flames, Significant, Unalone

I cannot say what color Lenore Beadsman’s eyes are; I cannot look at them; they are the sun to me.

Beadsmans, Color, Eye, Look, Looks, Say

Like so many other nerdy, disaffected young people of that time, I dreamed of becoming an 'artist', i. e. , somebody whose adult job was original and creative instead of tedious and dronelike.

Artist, Creative, Dronelike, Jobs, Tedious, Writing

You have decided being scared is caused mostly by thinking.

Thinking, Scared, Persons, Mostly, Caused

The way I think about things and experience things is not particularly linear, and it's not orderly, and it's not pyramidical, and there are a lot of loops.

Linear, Pyramidical, Think, Thinking, Way

1

...