Wallace Quotes & Sayings

Which he said was the big lie they all bought that made doctors and standard therapy such a waste of time for people like us
they thought that diagnosis was the same as cure. That if you knew why, it would stop. Which is bullshit. You only stop if you stop. — David Foster Wallace

The lion sleeps in the sun.
its nose on its paws.
it can kill a man. — Wallace Stevens

I do believe in the value of ideas - and that eventually they get a man somewhere. — DeWitt Wallace

I will be the stronger of the knowledge. In warning there is strength. — Lew Wallace

Sometimes what's important is dull. Sometimes it's work. Sometimes the important things aren't works of art for your entertainment, X. — David Foster Wallace

I think the truth is probably that enormous, sudden, dramatic, unexpected, life-changing experiences are not translatable or explainable to anyone else, and this is because they really are unique and particular - though not unique in the way the Christian girl believed. This is because their power isn't just a result of the experience itself, but also of the circumstances in which it hits you, of everything in your previous life-experience which has led up to it and made you exactly who and what you are when the experience hits you. — David Foster Wallace

It was a page he had Found in the handbook Of heartbreak. Wallace Stevens, "Madame la Fleurie," Collected Poems I — Cornelia Funke

Workshop Hermeticism, fiction for which the highest praise involves the words 'competent,' 'finished,' 'problem-free,' fiction over which Writing-Program pre- and proscriptions loom with the enclosing force of horizons: no character without Freudian trauma in accessible past, without near-diagnostic physical description; no image undissolved into regulation Updikean metaphor; no overture without a dramatized scene to 'show' what's 'told'; no denouement prior to an epiphany whose approach can be charted by and Freitag on any Macintosh. — David Foster Wallace

Mr. Bloemker moved closer. He smelled like a wet diaper. "What is it," he asked, looking over Lenore's shoulder.
"If it's what I think it is," said Lenore, "it's a sort of joke. A what do you call it. An antinomy."
"An antinomy?"
Lenore nodded. "Gramma really likes antinomies. I think this guy here," looking down at the drawing on the back of the label, "is the barber who shaves all and only those who do not shave themselves."
Mr. Bloemker looked at her. "A barber?"
"The big killer question," Lenore said to the sheet of paper, "is supposed to be whether the barber shaves himself. I think that's why his head's exploded, here."
"Beg pardon?"
"If he does, he doesn't, and if he doesn't, he does. — David Foster Wallace

Irving Wallace wrote a bestselling novel, The Man, in the 1960s about a black man becoming president of the United States. We thought that such a possibility was thousands of years in the future. Some people may still have some difficulty with the idea, but that's a major cultural meme shift. — Wayne Dyer

Sometimes life isn't magical, you see. Sometimes life is everyday. Its a trip to the keycutters in a rushed lunch break. It's the light, high rattle of a lightbulb's broken filament. It's your neighbour coming round to tell you you've left your car lights on.
Yes rarely its something outer. Maybe it's the glance of a girl on Charlotte street, for example. But how long before a glance runs out? How long can you keep coasting on a look? — Danny Wallace

If you close your eyes on a busy urban sidewalk the sound of everybody's different footwear's footsteps all put together sounds like something getting chewed by something huge and tireless and patient. — David Foster Wallace

No matter how boldly you stand against life's challenges, if the mind and body are weak you are basically defenseless. — Carlos Wallace

When you make a failure, it is because you have not asked for enough, keep on, and a larger thing then you were seeking will certainly come to you. Remember this. — Wallace D. Wattles

We'll have for a president a symbolic Rebel against his own power whose election was underwritten by inhuman soulless profit-machines whose takeover of American civic and spiritual life will convince Americans that rebellion against the soulless inhumanity of corporate life will consist in buying products from corporations that do the best job of representing corporate life as empty and soulless. We'll have a tyranny of conformist nonconformity presided over by a symbolic outsider whose very election depended on our deep conviction that his persona is utter bullshit. A rule of image, which because it's so empty makes everyone terrified - they're small and going to die, after all - — David Foster Wallace

Maybe it's the fact the most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip - and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It's more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendant horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we've hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it's stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naivete. — David Foster Wallace

For me, a play is a form of writing which isn't complete until it is interpreted by actors. But it's still a form of writing. And so most of my time is spent thinking about how to write a sentence. — Wallace Shawn

God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. — David Foster Wallace

What good is wealth if one is spiritually, emotionally, and mentally bankrupt? — Carlos Wallace

I am decidedly of the opinion that in very many instances we can trace such a necessary connexion, especially among birds, and often with more complete success than in the case which I have here attempted to explain. — Alfred Russel Wallace

The ghosts of my heart strolled in. — Randall Wallace

There is no emotion, there is peace.
There is no ignorance, there is knowledge.
There is no chaos, there is harmony.
There is no passion, there is serenity.
There is no death, there is the Force. — Daniel Wallace

We must realize that people do not have to conform to one another. We are after all, ultimately beholden to ourselves. — Carlos Wallace

It always seems to be important to have at least one person in the vicinity to hate. — David Foster Wallace

When you sever ties with the unit purely for self-serving intentions, you are likely to find yourself stranded and struggling to survive; fighting to keep your head above water. What's more, there is no one to save you because you've turned your back on your comrades and snubbed your support system. — Carlos Wallace

The thing that I think a lot of us forget is that part of the fault is the books ... you get this sort of cycle that as they become less important commercially they begin protecting their egos by talking more and more to each other and establishing themselves as this kind of tight cloistered world that doesn't really have anything to do with regular readers. — David Foster Wallace

You like it under the trees in autumn, because everything is half dead. The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves and repeats words without menaing. — Wallace Stevens

Color prejudice and religion are akin in one respect. Some folks have it and some don't, and the kernel that is responsible for it is present in us all. — Wallace Thurman

Let me put it this way: You cannot live in the world without being in pain, spiritual and physical pain. We have developed mechanisms to deal with these pains, to overcome them somehow. Therapy, religion and spirituality, relationships, material success. All this can work, but also become a problem itself.
The pursuit of happiness has even been put into the American constitution a couple centuries ago. Today we're so rich, we own much more than we need, we have liberties unknown before, even though they are endangered in the current political climate in the US - and we forget how wonderful it nevertheless is, compared to most other political and economic systems. We have a saying that goes: Give a man enough rope and he hangs himself. — David Foster Wallace

Really good work probably comes out of a willingness to disclose yourself, open yourself up in spiritual and emotional ways that risk making you look banal or melodramatic or naive or unhip or sappy, and to ask the reader really to feel something. To be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I'm scared about how sappy this'll look in print, saying this. And the effort actually to do it, not just talk about it, requires a kind of courage I don't seem to have yet. — David Foster Wallace

There is, as Emerson says, some central idea or conception of yourself by which all the facts of your life are arranged and classified. Change this central idea and you change the arrangement or classification of all the fact and circumstances of your life. — Wallace D. Wattles

The severing of an established connection is exponentially more painful than the rejection of an attempted connection. — David Foster Wallace

First, you believe that there is one intelligent substance, from which all things proceed. Second, you believe that this substance gives you everything you desire. And third, you relate yourself to it by a feeling of deep and profound gratitude. — Wallace D. Wattles

(on Updike) Has the son of a bitch ever had one unpublished thought? — David Foster Wallace

You Can't Unring a Bell. — David Foster Wallace

Their handshake looked, for the first split-second he looked, like C.T. was jacking off and the little girl was going Sieg Heil. — David Foster Wallace

We live in an old chaos of the sun. — Wallace Stevens

live in an era of terrible preoccupation with presentation and interpretation, one in which the relations between who someone is and what he believes and how he "expresses himself" 70 have been thrown into big-time flux. — David Foster Wallace

This idea was also brought out very clearly by Wallace, who emphasized that apparently reasonable activities of man might very well have developed without an actual application of reasoning. — Franz Boas

Ideas, of course, have a place in fiction, and any writer of fiction needs a mind. But ideas are not the best subject matter for fiction. They do not dramatize well. They are, rather, a by-product, something the reader himself is led to formulate after watching the story unfold. The ideas, the generalizations, ought to be implicit in the selection and arrangement of the people and places and actions. They ought to haunt a piece of fiction as a ghost flits past an attic window after dark. — Wallace Stegner

I wanna leave this world better than I found it. I have the ability to draw people to my comedy shows so I wanna use that blessing not to make money but to make a difference. — Carlos Wallace

If you wish to take shamatha all the way to its ground, however, it requires a supportive, serene environment, good diet, proper exercise, and very few preoccupations. The necessary internal conditions are minimal desires, few activities and concerns, contentment, pure ethical discipline, and freedom from obsessive, compulsive thinking. It is my feeling that the achievement of shamatha is so rare today because those circumstances are so rare. It is difficult to find a conducive environment in which to practice at length and without interference - even more so to have that and access to suitable spiritual friends for support and guidance. Therefore, if the causes are difficult to bring together, the result - shamatha - is also necessarily rare. — B. Alan Wallace

something is malignantly addictive if (1) it causes real problems for the addict, and (2) it offers itself as a relief from the very problems it causes. — David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace: I always fear that when I really impose my will on something, the universe is gonna punish me. — David Lipsky

Wheelchair-accessible front ramp, take a bit of getting used to, and some like the engineer never do get comfortable with them and use the less garish auditory side-doors; and the abundant sulcus-fissures and gyrus-bulges of the slick latex roof make rain-drainage complex and footing chancy at best, so there's not a whole lot of recreational strolling up here, although a kind of safety-balcony of skull-colored polybutylene resin, which curves around the midbrain from the inferior frontal sulcus to the parietooccipital sulcus - a halo-ish ring at the level of like eaves, demanded by the Cambridge Fire Dept. over the heated pro-mimetic protests of topological Rickeyites over in the Architecture Dept. (which the M.I.T. administration, trying to placate Rickeyites and C.F.D. Fire Marshal both, had had the pre-molded resin injected with dyes to render it the distinctively icky brown-shot off-white of living skull, so that the balcony resembles at once corporeal bone and — David Foster Wallace

For know you, child, I have that faculty which is better than any one sense, better than a perfect body, better than courage and will, better than experience, ordinarily the best product of the longest lives - the faculty divinest of men, but which" - he stopped, and laughed again, not bitterly, but with real zest - "but which even the great do not sufficiently account, while with the herd it is a non-existent - the faculty of drawing men to my purpose and holding them faithfully to its achievement, by which, as against things to be done, I multiply myself into hundreds and thousands. — Lew Wallace

It has been generally the custom of writers on natural history to take the habits and instincts of animals as the fixed point, and to consider their structure and organization as specially adapted to be in accordance with them. — Alfred Russel Wallace

The windy sky
Cries out a literate despair. — Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens: the Platonist celebrates endless change, but with regret. — Mason Cooley

Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential. — Wallace Stevens

She studied it soberly, with something like recognition or acknowledgment in her eyes, as if those who have been dead understand things that will never be understood by those who have only lived. In — Wallace Stegner

WALLY: . . . That may be why I never understand what's going on at a party, and I'm always completely confused. I mean, we'll come home, and Debby will describe some incredible incident, and I won't have even noticed it. Everything passes in a kind of trance. You know, Debby once said after one of these New York evenings that she thought she'd traveled a greater distance just by journeying from her origins in the suburbs of Chicago to that New York evening than her grandmother had traveled in making her way from the steppes of Russia to the suburbs of Chicago. — Wallace Shawn

Wisdom is the essential basis of greatness. — Wallace D. Wattles

Wisdom is the power to perceive the best ends to aim at and the best means for reaching those ends. — Wallace D. Wattles

And Lo, for the Earth was empty of Form, and void. And Darkness was all over the Face of the Deep. And We said: 'Look at that fucker Dance. — David Foster Wallace

Uniform Convergence & Associated Aracana item (d) for exceptional points, which again please recall can also be called 'discontinuities'. (N.B.: Some math classes also use singularity to mean exceptional point, which is both confusing and intriguing since the term also refers to Black Holes, which in a sense is what discontinuities are.) — David Foster Wallace

Recall Part 3c's mention of how Cantor took what had been regarded as a paradoxical, totally unhandlable feature of (Infinity)-namely that an infinite set/class/aggregate can be put into a one-to-one correspondence with its own subset-and transformed it into the technical def. of infinite set. Watch how he does the same thing here, turning what appear to be devastating objections into rigorous criteria, by defining a set S as any aggregate of collection of discrete entities that satisfies two conditions: (1) S can be entertained by the mind as an aggregate, and (2) There is some stated rule or condition via which one can determine, for any entity x, whether or not x is a member of S. — David Foster Wallace

Freedom is like a man who kills himself
Each night, an incessant butcher, whose knife
Grows sharp in blood. — Wallace Stevens

I'm not trying to be noble. I'm afraid. And the idea of having more love than I've ever had
and knowing I might never have it again
that scares me worse than anything. — Randall Wallace

I think I was very often bored as a child, but boredom is not what I knew it as - what I knew was that I worried a lot — David Foster Wallace

There was somewhere, if you knew where to find it, some place where money could be made like drawing water from a well, some Big Rock Candy Mountain where life was effortless and rich and unrestricted and full of adventure and action, where something could be had for nothing. — Wallace Stegner

Who says one instance of writing has anything in common with another instance? — Wallace Shawn

There are three motives for which we live; we live for the body, we live for the mind, we live for the soul. No one of these is better or holier than the other; all are alike desirable, and no one of the three - body, mind, or soul - can live fully if either of the others is cut short of full life and expression. — Wallace D. Wattles

I think the only thing for me, the tricky thing with the footnotes, is that they are an irritant, and they require a little extra work, and so they either have to be really germane or they have to be kind of fun to read. — David Foster Wallace

I still feel the need of some imperishable bliss. — Wallace Stevens

Not real bright - she thought the figure he'd trace without thinking on her bare flank after sex was the numeral 8, to give you an idea. — David Foster Wallace

Pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. per se. — David Foster Wallace

Unless we believe in the hero, what is there
To believe? Incisive what, the fellow
Of what good. Devise. Make him of mud ... — Wallace Stevens

When I was first starting to write plays, I quite literally had never heard of the idea of studying playwriting. I wouldn't have studied it even if I had heard of it. — Wallace Shawn

In a moment, everything can change and in a moment, you can change everything. — Daniel Wallace

Tell X that speech is not dirty silence
Clarified. It is silence made still dirtier. — Wallace Stevens

The sun would leave my sky if I couldn't assume you'd simply come and tell me you were sad. — David Foster Wallace

Then he looked up, despite all best prior intentions. In four minutes, it would be another hour; a half hour after that was the ten-minute break. Lane Dean imagined himself running around on the break, waving his arms and shouting gibberish and holding ten cigarettes at once in his mouth, like a panpipe. Year after year, a face the same color as your desk. Lord Jesus. Coffee wasn't allowed because of spills on the files, but on the break he'd have a big cup of coffee in each hand while he pictured himself running around the outside grounds, shouting. He knew what he'd really do on the break was sit facing the wall clock in the lounge and, despite prayers and effort, count the seconds tick off until he had to come back and do this again. And again and again and again. — David Foster Wallace

The law of gratitude is the natural principle that action and reaction are always equal and in opposite directions. — Wallace D. Wattles

Be good to yourself. Listen to your body, to your heart. We're very hard on ourselves, and we're always feeling like we're not doing enough. It's a terribly hard job. — Marcia Wallace

I submit that the real reason we criticized and disliked Lynch's Laura's muddy bothness is that it required of us an empathetic confrontation with the exact same muddy bothness in ourselves and our intimates that makes the real world of moral selves so tense and uncomfortable, a bothness we go to the movies to get a couple hours' fucking relief from. — David Foster Wallace

I've always thought of myself as a realist. I can remember fighting with my professors about it in grad school. The world that I live in consists of 250 advertisements a day and any number of unbelievably entertaining options, most of which are subsidized by corporations that want to sell me things. The whole way that the world acts on my nerve endings is bound up with stuff that the guys with the leather patches on their elbows would consider pop or trivial or ephemeral. I use a fair amount of pop stuff in my fiction, but what I mean by it is nothing different than what other people mean in writing about trees and parks and having to walk to the river to get water 100 years ago. It's just the texture of the world I live in. — David Foster Wallace

When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces.
The man who'd introduced them didn't much like either of them, though he acted as if he did, anxious as he was to preserve good relations at all times. One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one. — David Foster Wallace

I asked for help, which is the hardest thing in the world. — Marcia Wallace

In the heat of the moment, rational thinking tends to elude us. — Carlos Wallace

But if I decide to decide there's a different, less selfish, less lonely point to my life, won't the reason for this decision be my desire to be less lonely, meaning to suffer less overall pain? Can the decision to be less selfish ever be anything other than a selfish decision? — David Foster Wallace

The library, and step on it! — David Foster Wallace

I was reading a poem by my idol, Wallace Stevens, in which he said, 'The self is a cloister of remembered sounds.' My first response was, Yesss! How did he know that? It's like he's reading my mind. But my second response was, I need some new sounds to remember. I've been stuck in my little isolation chamber for so long I'm spinning through the same sounds I've been hearing in my head all my life. If I go on this way, I'll get old too fast, without remembering any more sounds than I already know now. The only one who remembers any of my sounds is me. How do you turn down the volume on your personal-drama earphones and learn how to listen to other people? How do you jump off one moving train, marked Yourself, and jump onto a train moving in the opposite direction, marked Everybody Else? I loved a Modern Lovers song called, 'Don't Let Our Youth Go to Waste,' and I didn't want to waste mine. — Rob Sheffield

In ways that certain of us are uncomfortable about, SNOOTs' attitudes about contemporary usage resemble religious/political conservatives' attitudes about contemporary culture. We combine a missionary zeal and a near-neural faith in our beliefs' importance with a curmudgeonly hell-in-a-handbasket despair at the way English is routinely manhandled and corrupted by supposedly educated people. The Evil is all around us: boners and clunkers and solecistic howlers and bursts of voguish linguistic methane that make any SNOOT's cheek twitch and forehead darken. A fellow SNOOT I know likes to say that listening to most people's English feels like watching somebody use a Stradivarius to pound nails: We are the Few, the Proud, the Appalled at Everyone Else. — David Foster Wallace

In other words, Cantor is able to show that real numbers themselves can serve as the limits of fundamental sequences of reals, meaning his system of definitions is self-enclosed and VIR-proof. — David Foster Wallace

When you are a free and independent writer, without employer, without hours or deadlines, you have to play little games to force yourself into the actual writing. For me, one game is to announce...that I have finally decided on my next book, that I am ready to write it...to put my pride on the line. — Irving Wallace

spirit deal only in truth, and they come through to tell the greatest truth of all: that love goes on after their passing. — Jayne Wallace

In a world of universal poverty
The philosophers alone will be fat
Against the autumn winds
In an autumn that will be perpetual. — Wallace Stevens

My style as a human being is to indulge people who need to escape, yet I insist on confronting them as a playwright. It's quite embarrassing, it's quite unpleasant, it's quite awkward. — Wallace Shawn

We all have stories, just as you do. Ways in which he touched us, helped us, gave us money, sold it to us wholesale. Lots of stories, big and small. They all add up. Over a lifetime it all adds up. That's why we're here, William. We're a a part of him, who he is, just as he is a part of us. You still don't understand, do you?"
I didn't. But as I stared at the man and he stared back at me, in my father's dream I remembered where we'd met before.
"And what did my father do for you?" I asked him, and the old man smiled.
"He made me laugh," he said. — Daniel Wallace

What children we are, even the wisest! When God walks the earth, his steps are often centuries apart. — Lew Wallace

Can you "choose" something when you are forcefully and enthusiastically immersed in it at an age when the resources and information necessary for choosing are not yet yours? — David Foster Wallace

I'm very bright, but I'm terrified of sounding like someone who thinks he's very bright-because those people are assholes. — David Foster Wallace

Just the thought of getting up made me glad I was lying on the floor. — David Foster Wallace

Fascism is a worldwide disease. Its greatest threat to the United States will come after the war, either via Latin America or within the United States itself. — Henry A. Wallace

If you're subjected to enough great salesmen and salespitches and marketing concepts for long enough - like from your earliest Saturday-morning cartoons, let's say - it is only a matter of time before you start believing deep down that everything is sales and marketing, and that whenever somebody seems like they care about you or about some noble idea or cause, that person is really a salesman and really ultimately doesn't give a shit about you or some cause but really just wants something for himself. — David Foster Wallace

desire is the sugar in human food. — David Foster Wallace

Being a Negro writer these days is a racket and I'm going to make the most of it while it lasts. About twice a year I sell a story. It is acclaimed. I am a genius in the making. Thank God for this Negro literary renaissance. Long may it flourish — Wallace Thurman

I love writing. I've always been drawn to that and felt a particular joy in it - like the phrase in Chariots of Fire: "God made me fast and when I run I feel his pleasure." God gave me a love of writing and (I knew) to do it I would feel God's pleasure. — Randall Wallace

Touch. It is touch that is the deadliest enemy of chastity, loyalty, monogamy, gentility with its codes and conventions and restraints. By touch we are betrayed and betray others ... an accidental brushing of shoulders or touching of hands ... hands laid on shoulders in a gesture of comfort that lies like a thief, that takes, not gives, that wants, not offers, that awakes, not pacifies. When one flesh is waiting, there is electricity in the merest contact. — Wallace Stegner