Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Some words have to be explicitly uttered, Lenore. Only by actually uttering certain words does one really DO what one SAYS. 'Love' is one of those words, performative words. Some words can literally make things real.
David Foster Wallace
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Real
Explicitly
Writing
Uttered
Really
Literally
Make
Says
Things
Actually
Love
Words
Certain
Performative
Doe
Uttering
More quotes by David Foster Wallace
I like the fans’ sound at night. Do you? It’s like somebody big far away goes like: it’sOKit’sOKit’sOKit’sOK, over and over. From very far away.
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
Progressive liberals seem incapable of stating the obvious truth: that we who are well off should be willing to share more of what we have with poor people not for the poor people's sake but for our own i.e., we should share what we have in order to become less narrow and frightened and lonely and self-centered people.
David Foster Wallace
I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I'm not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I.
David Foster Wallace
Probably the most dangerous thing about college education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract arguments inside my head instead of simply paying attention to what's going on right in front of me. TC mark
David Foster Wallace
Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.
David Foster Wallace
The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.
David Foster Wallace
I don't want to hurt myself. I want to stop hurting.
David Foster Wallace
She had a brainy girls discomfort about her own beauty and its effects on folks.
David Foster Wallace
The integrity of my sleep has been forever compromised, sir.
David Foster Wallace
Real leaders are people who “help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.
David Foster Wallace
Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.
David Foster Wallace
People, unless they're paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority.
David Foster Wallace
Almost anything that you pay close, direct attention to becomes interesting.
David Foster Wallace
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
Te Occidere Possunt Sed Te Edere Non Possunt Nefas Est (They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier).
David Foster Wallace
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.
David Foster Wallace
I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it.
David Foster Wallace
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 this it's its sole raison.
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