David Foster Wallace Quotes

Two young salmon are swimming along one day. As they do, they are passed by a wiser, older fish coming the other way. The wiser fish greets the two as he passes, saying, "Morning boys, how's the water?" The other two continue to swim in silence for a little while, until the first one turns to the other and asks, "What the hell is water?"

Fish don't know much about water, and people didn't know much about air.

You mean you live down here?' Matilda asked. 'I do', Miss Honey replied, but she said no more. Matilda had never once stopped to think about where Miss Honey might be living. She had always regarded her purely as a teacher, a person who turned up out of nowhere and taught at school and then went away again.

Fish are not the best authority on water.

The fish will be the last to discover water.

People take reality for granted.

The perception of what a thing is and the perception of what it means are not separate, either.

The hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes.

Reality is what trips you up when you walk around with your eyes closed.

As the fish doesn't know water, people are ignorant of space. Consciousness is concerned only with changing and varying details; it ignores constants-especially constant backgrounds. Thus only very exceptional people are aware of what is basic to everything.

What we think is less than what we know; What we know is less than what we love; What we love is so much less than what there is. And to that precise extent we are so much less than what we are.

that expression you get in your eyes when you are very tired and everything is like a dream and you are starting to know what things are like underneath what people say they are.

I thought again how you could never really know what you were seeing with just a glance, in motion, passing by. Good or bad, right or wrong. There was always so much more.

All you know is what you think you know, but that isn't always what's real.

How much of what we call 'reality' is actually out there or rather within our own head?

Bella, it's not my fault if you are exceptionally unobservant.

There is truth in all things, if you understand them well.

It seems to me that the real problem is the mind itself and not the problem which the mind has created and tries to solve.

You think you know someone. But mostly you just know what you want to know.

You take the senses away, and there is no consciousness. Consciousness comes from experience.

This is not magic. This is the way the world is, only very few people take the time to stop and note it.

Perhaps its not the world that is soundless but we who are deaf.

It is sure to be dark if you shut your eyes.

The composition is the thing seen by everyone living in the living they are doing, they are the composing of the composition that at the time they are living is the composition of the time in which they are living.

If ignorance were enough to make things not exist, the world would be more like a lot of people think it is. But it's not. And it's not.