“How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.”
-David Foster Wallace, "The Pale King"
David Foster Wallace is a writer with a unique ability to rewire the way you think about reading and writing. It takes months and reading many books by a lot of other authors, to diminish the feeling that other writers are somehow missing something by not appending footnotes and endnotes to their writing. After reading David Foster Wallace, you see potential asterisks everywhere; thoughts within thoughts, perennially. You may not consider yourself a writer, but suddenly you wish you can alter the way every sentence you read is structured. His penchant for clever observations and finding the exact words necessary to explain his genius, makes him one of the most exciting authors one can read.
While DFW is best known for his incredibly long, and incredible, magnum opus “Infinite Jest,” he does offer a considerable amount of bite-size quotes.
“Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”
― David Foster Wallace,
David Foster Wallace knew what it meant to be a great writer of fiction. However, Wallace was also a prolific non-fiction writer, breathing life into diverse, atypical, sometimes uncomplicated, subject matter.
“You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.”
― David Foster Wallace,"Infinite Jest"
Some may consider quotes such as these “too depressing” or “too real?” Adjectives which, by the way, DFW would likely approve of, given his inclination toward mixing "high-culture" and "low-culture."
“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”
― David Foster Wallace, "Infinite Jest"
There is some unavoidably deep-seated sadness here as well.
“...logical validity is not a guarantee of truth.”
― David Foster Wallace, "Infinite Jest"
David Foster Wallace was not only a writer of fiction and non-fiction, but an amateur mathematician as well. In fact he wrote two books relating to the subject, one of which was one of his senior theses, which was later released as “Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will.” The other was “Everything and More: A Company History of Infinity.” DFW’s background indicates he is in a very qualified position to state the fact that because something is logical mathematically, it does not guarantee truth, which I’m sure most of us intuit to be true.
“I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.”
― David Foster Wallace, "Infinite Jest"
This one’s just funny.
“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
― David Foster Wallace, "Infinite Jest"
David Foster Wallace killed himself in September of 2008, making this quote all the more profound, and sad. Anyone who struggles with depression can relate to this quote on the deepest level. I am yet to have come across a quote that more accurately describes what it is like being in the depths of depression.
“There's good self-consciousness, and then there's toxic, paralyzing, raped-by-psychic-Bedouins self-consciousness.”
― David Foster Wallace, “The Lost Years and Last Days of David Foster Wallace" by David Lipsky
His mind sounded like a nightmare. Considering how his life ended, I reckon he would agree that was the case.
“If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.”
― David Foster Wallace, "Up, Simba!"
His power of observation where modern events are concerned is what I most miss reading from David Foster Wallace. He could breathe life into any subject and explain things in ways that immediately make sense. His gift was that, while clearly a genius (a recipient of the MacArthur Genius Grant, in fact), he could speak in ways most anyone could understand, even if you may need a dictionary on hand.
A few other great quotes:
“Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself.”
― David Foster Wallace
“Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.”
― David Foster Wallace, "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men"
“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, "This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life"
“Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.”
― David Foster Wallace, "Conversations with David Foster Wallace," by Stephen J. Burn
