Now a second-order vain person is a vain person who’s also vain about appearing to have an utter lack of vanity. Who’s enormously afraid that other people will perceive him as vain. A second-order vain person will sit up late learning jokes in order to appear funny and charming, but will deny that he sits up late learning jokes. Or he’ll perhaps even try to give the impression that he doesn’t regard himself as funny at all.

— David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace Quotes

It may be that mathematics is not generally recognized as one of the arts precisely because so much pyramidal training and practice is required in order to appreciate its aesthetics; math is perhaps the ultimate in acquired tastes.

— David Foster Wallace

The lie is that it’s one or the other. A still, floating bee is moving faster than it can think. From overhead the sweetness drives it crazy.

— David Foster Wallace

Because it literally makes no sense. Close to two hundred people all punishing somebody by getting embarrassed for him, killing him by empathetically dying right there with him, for him, up there at the podium. The applause when this guy’s done has the relieved feel of a fist unclenching, and their cries of ‘Keep Coming!’ are so sincere it’s almost painful.

— David Foster Wallace

The medical attache partakes of neither kif nor distilled spirits, and must unwind without chemical aid.

— David Foster Wallace

It’s worse in Philly!

— David Foster Wallace

That old cartridge, Nichols and the big Indian. Distortion. They give you a general here right? They put you under. It’s not that bad. I’ll go willingly.

— David Foster Wallace

David set out to write a novel about some of the hardest subjects in the world – sadness and boredom – and to make that exploration nothing less than dramatic, funny, and deeply moving. Everyone who worked with David knows well how he resisted letting the world see work that was not refined to his exacting standard. But an unfinished novel is what we have, and how can we not look? David, alas, isn’t here to stop us from reading, or to forgive us for wanting to. – Michael Pietsch.

— David Foster Wallace

There’s sun on the wall with the hanging viewer and poster of the paranoid king and an enormous hand-drawn Sierpinski gasket.

— David Foster Wallace

Troeltsch’s so dumb he thinks a manila folder’s a Filipino contortionist.

— David Foster Wallace

A large head is all The Darkness knows.

— David Foster Wallace

These guys are always 25–30 and look 45–60 and are a better ad for sobriety at any cost than any ad agency could come up with.

— David Foster Wallace

They thunder eastward across pedalferrous terrain that today is fallow, denuded. To the east, dimmed by the fulvous cloud the hamsters send up, is the vivid verdant ragged outline of the annularly overfertilized forests of what used to be central Maine. All these territories.

— David Foster Wallace

The emotionally Hobbesian meat market of the “dating scene”.

— David Foster Wallace

Something happens to a novel as it ages, but what? It doesn’t ripen or deepen in the manner of cheese and wine, and it doesn’t fall apart, at least not figuratively. Fiction has no half-life. We age alongside the novels we’ve read, and only one of us is actively deteriorating. Which is to say that a novel is perishable only by virtue of being stored in such a leaky cask: our heads.

— David Foster Wallace

Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us27 spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention.

— David Foster Wallace

This is what I get for passing down priceless fruits of hard experience to somebody who still thinks it’s exciting to shave.

— David Foster Wallace

Here is how to take nonnarcotic muscle relaxants for the back spasms that come from thousands of serves to no one. Here is how to weep in bed trying to remember when your torn blue ankle didn’t hurt every minute. This is the whirlpool, a friend.

— David Foster Wallace

Orin, Mario, and Hal’s late father was revered as a genius in his original profession without anybody ever realizing what he really turned out to be a genius at, even he himself, at least not while he was alive, which is perhaps bona-fidely tragic but also, as far as Mario’s concerned, ultimately all right, if that’s the way things unfolded.

— David Foster Wallace

Hefenreffers awakened Gately and his new droogs to the usually-dormant-but-apparently-ever-lurking ill will of innocent-seeming public sidewalks everywhere.

— David Foster Wallace

That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt.

— David Foster Wallace
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