David Foster Wallace Quotes

Age for me is just a number.

Doesn't every generation feel like the one that's coming up behind them doesn't know how to grow up? I'm not sure if we're progressively getting worse or if your perspective shifts.

The passions of the young are vices in the old.

It always interests me how obsessed people are about age.

Now there is this whole terror about getting old. Today, that fascination with youth is overrated. What's so special about being young? I just say that because I'm old.

Young people are the same as they always were. They are just as ignorant.

When I was young, people used to say to me: Wait until you're fifty, you'll see. I am fifty. I haven't seen anything.

Young people live exactly today... and they live in the immediacy of their world. And it's important for us, people from older generations to realize that a lot of our values, a lot of our truths are no longer truths, are no longer valuable.

It's a shame to see these young chicks bungle their lives away in a flurry and rush to compete with what was in the old days the goodtime relationships we had with the GTOs and people like that. When it came to looning, they could give us as much of a looning as we could give them. It's a shame, really.

As the population is, in general, aging, there is more interest in what a 50-year-old, a 60-year-old, a 70-year-old, an 80-year-old is like. And one of the things that just naturally started to happen as I got older - and I could feel younger people looking up to me in a certain way and wanting to know things that I knew - I got interested in the women, in particular, who were 20 years older than me. Because I understand in a way that I didn't 20, 30 years ago, how much they know.

I don't really take the college tours and all that. Those are young people and I'm quite sure they're mature enough to understand, but they haven't seen or lived real life yet.

Surely it isn't illegal here to complain about young people these days? How cruel. I had thought it a basic part of human nature, one of the few universally practiced human customs.

There is no difference in quality between a life lived forward and a life lived backwards, she thinks. She had come to love this backward life. It was, after all, the only life she had.

You have a lot more to give, the older you get. And you want to give it. I mean, some people want to give it. But there is a desire to pass down, to have a hand in the past and a hand in the future. There's a continuum.

...if a man comes to his fortieth year, and has any understanding at all, he has virtually seen - thanks to their similarity - all possible happenings, both past and to come.

You know, you want to be outrageous when you're young, so all the young people say, "Oooh . . ." Now my tactics are different.

I do not wish you much happiness--it would bore you; I do not wish you trouble either; but, following the people's philosophy, I will simply repeat: 'Live more' and try somehow not to be too bored; this useless wish I am adding on my own.

"I won't apologize for my past. A man is supposed to have experience." "From all indications, you've acquired enough for ten men".

Old people always tell you: 'When you've been around as long I have, then you can argue.' As soon as they're ripped off, it's a different story.

It infuriated him to think that there were still people in the state who believed in a loving and merciful God. There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic, too, and what he had experienced was vacancy--a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all.

People say to me 'You've changed.' and I say 'Haven't you?' People change, it's just life.

Somehow, we have to get older people back close to growing children if we are to restore a sense of community, acquire knowledge of the past, and provide a sense of the future.

You know you're getting old when kids start to dress like you used to and movies are made about your teen life.

Grandchildren now don't write a thank you for the Christmas presents. They are walking on their pants with their cap on backward, listening to the Enema Man and Snoopy, Snoopy Poop Dog.

Awareness is everything. Hallie once pointed out to me that people worry a lot more about the eternity *after* their deaths than the eternity that happened before they were born. But it's the same amount of infinity, rolling out in all directions from where we stand.