David Foster Wallace Quotes

I was actually looking for answers where I kept asking myself - what am I doing?

There are times I can't even figure myself out.

I've had times in my life when I really haven't been able to figure myself out.

I don't know who I am. Or maybe I do know who I am and I just don't want to be her anymore.

I whispered, 'I am too young,' and then, 'I am old enough'; wherefore I threw a penny to find out if I might love.

I was just struggling with my inner vachette and pondering the depths of my own inhumanity.

There are some things about myself I can’t explain to anyone. There are some things I don’t understand at all. I can’t tell what I think about things or what I’m after. I don’t know what my strengths are or what I’m supposed to do about them. But if I start thinking about these things in too much detail the whole thing gets scary. And if I get scared I can only think about myself. I become really self-centered, and without meaning to, I hurt people. So I’m not such a wonderful human being.

I don't know who I am. But I do know who I'm not. I have occasionally tried playing people I'm definitely not, and that wasn't a very pleasant experience.

I do not know who I am, where I am going - and I am the one who has to decide the answers to these hideous questions.

She wondered if she was doomed to be one of those people who spend their lives trying things.

We may listen to our inner self-and still not know which ocean we hear roaring.

I usually congratulate people when they tell me, "I don't know who I am anymore".

We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact.

If you ask me to play myself, I will not know what to do. I do not know who or what I am.

Bob Marley isn't my name. I don't even know my name yet.

I know it sounds pathetic, but I don't know who I am.

I know that I am what I am. But I am not sure what I am.

When I read profiles of myself, I sometimes think: 'I have spent my whole life struggling to understand my motivations and impulses, and I've never quite sorted them out.'

I was very unsure about what I wanted to do in high school.

My songs are about not knowing who to be and not knowing how to act.

My sense of myself is that I was a rather unformed kind of person trying to make myself up out of bits of spit and string.

I am a spy in the house of me. I report back from the front lines of the battle that is me. I am somewhat nonplused by the event that is my life.

Who among us is so certain of our identity? Who hasn't been asked, 'What's your background?' and hesitated, even for a split second, to answer their inquisitor. Howard Jacobson's 'The Finkler Question' forces us to ask that of ourselves, and that's why it's a must read, no matter what your background.

I think it was when I ran into Kerouac and Burroughs - when I was 17 - that I realized I was talking through an empty skull... I wasn't thinking my own thoughts or saying my own thoughts.

I had money, but I still didn't know what to do with my life.