David Foster Wallace Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?""I give.""You get someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog. Infinite Jest

2. Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere Mary went, the lights became erratic. Infinite Jest

3. That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack. That concentrating on anything is very hard work. Infinite Jest

4. The integrity of my sleep has been forever compromised, sir.

5. The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you. Infinite Jest

6. 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? This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

7. Think of the old cliché about the mind being 'an excellent servant but a terrible master'. This, like many clichés, so lame & banal on the surface, actually expresses a great & terrible truth. This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

8. What if the preacher or father’s saying ‘Someone here’s lost and hopeless’ was tantamount to those Sun-Times horoscopes that are specially designed to be so universally obvious that they always give their horoscope readers that special eerie feeling of particularity and insight, exploiting the psychological fact that most people are narcissistic and prone to the illusion that they and their problems are uniquely special and that if they’re feeling a certain way then surely they’re the only person who is feeling like that. The Pale King

9. I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I'm starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life's sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. But since it's my own choices that'll lock me in, it seems unavoidable--if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

10. It's always seemed a little preposterous that Hamlet, for all his paralyzing doubt about everything, never once doubts the reality of the ghost. Never questions his own madness might not in fact be unfeigned. Infinite Jest

11. Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

12. Tell them there are no holes for your fingers in the masks ofmen. Tell them how could you ever even hope to love what you can'tgrab onto. Girl with Curious Hair

13. There’s been time this whole time. You can’t kill time with your heart. Everything takes time. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

14. This is why they started us here so young: to give ourselves away before the age when the questions 'why' and 'to what' grow real beaks and claws. Infinite Jest

15. Time wasn't passing so much as kneeling beside him in a torn tee-shirt disclosing the rodent-nosed tits of a man who disdains the care of his once-comely bod. Infinite Jest

16. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately (...) To games or needles, to some other person. Infinite Jest

17. What I know about auto racing could be inscribed with a dry Magic Marker on the lip of a Coke bottle. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments