David Foster Wallace Quotes.

1. "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."
- Quote by David Foster Wallace

2. "Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties -- all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion -- these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated."
- Quote by David Foster Wallace

3. "Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it."
- Quote by David Foster Wallace

4. "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?"
- Quote by David Foster Wallace

5. "Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being."
- Quote by David Foster Wallace

6. "The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die."
- Quote by David Foster Wallace

7. "Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself."
- Quote by David Foster Wallace

8. "Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else."
- Quote by David Foster Wallace

9. "What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves, they've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings."
- Quote by David Foster Wallace

10. "I had kind of a midlife crisis at twenty which probably doesn’t augur well for my longevity"
- Quote by David Foster Wallace