Quote

life's endless war against the self you cannot live without.

David Foster Wallace

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

David Foster Wallace
Age: 45 †
Born: 1962
Born: February 21
Died: 2008
Died: February 12
Author
Essayist
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Ithica
New York
David Wallace
Self
Life
Endless
War
Cannot
Live
Without

More quotes by David Foster Wallace

Image
Almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it.
David Foster Wallace
Image
Stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.
David Foster Wallace
Image
Fiction is about what it is to be a human being.
David Foster Wallace
Image
One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.
David Foster Wallace
Image
Lucky people develop a relationship with a certain kind of art that becomes spiritual, almost religious, and doesn’t mean, you know, church stuff, but it means you’re just never the same.
David Foster Wallace
Image
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says 'Morning, boys. How's the water?' And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes 'What the hell is water?'
David Foster Wallace
Image
I'd tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear
David Foster Wallace
Image
We will, of course, without hesitation use art to parody, ridicule, debunk, or criticize ideologies.
David Foster Wallace
Image
I have filled 3 Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me.
David Foster Wallace
Image
Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever.
David Foster Wallace
Image
Think of the old cliché about ‘the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.’ This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head.
David Foster Wallace
Image
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
Image
I read,' I say. 'I study and read. I bet I've read everything you've read. Don't think I haven't. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, The library, and step on it.
David Foster Wallace
Image
The point of books is to combat loneliness.
David Foster Wallace
Image
Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.
David Foster Wallace
Image
I miss everyone. I can remember being young and feeling a thing and identifying it as homesickness, and then thinking well now that’s odd, isn’t it, because I was home, all the time. What on earth are we to make of that?
David Foster Wallace
Image
Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T true is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it.
David Foster Wallace
Image
I want to tell you,' the voice on the phone said. 'My head is filled with things to say.' ... 'I don't mind,' Hal said softly. 'I could wait forever.' 'That's what you think,' the voice said. The connection was cut.
David Foster Wallace
Image
American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.
David Foster Wallace
Image
Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.
David Foster Wallace