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David Foster Wallace Inspirational Quotes (172)

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The sound of wind had become, for me, silence. When it went away, I was left with the squeak of the blood in my head and the aural glitter of all those little eardrum hairs quivering like a drunk in withdrawal.
David Foster Wallace
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Probably the most dangerous thing about college education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract arguments inside my head instead of simply paying attention to what's going on right in front of me. TC mark
David Foster Wallace
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The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, 'then' what do we do?
David Foster Wallace
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Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.
David Foster Wallace
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The way I think about things and experience things is not particularly linear, and it's not orderly, and it's not pyramidical, and there are a lot of loops.
David Foster Wallace
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One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.
David Foster Wallace
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Dostoevski informs everybody or he ought to.
David Foster Wallace
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The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates.
David Foster Wallace
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sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them.
David Foster Wallace
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Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself.
David Foster Wallace
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What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love? What if the temple comes to Mohammed? What if you just love? without deciding? You just do: you see her and in that instant are lost to sober account-keeping and cannot choose but to love?
David Foster Wallace
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Lucky people develop a relationship with a certain kind of art that becomes spiritual, almost religious, and doesn’t mean, you know, church stuff, but it means you’re just never the same.
David Foster Wallace
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This is so American, man: either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it.
David Foster Wallace
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Certain sincerely devout and spiritually advanced people believe that the God of their understanding helps them find parking places and gives them advice on Mass. Lottery numbers.
David Foster Wallace
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Kafka's evocations are, rather, unconscious and almost sub-archetypal, the little-kid stuff from which myths derive this is why we tend to call even his weirdest stories nightmarish rather than surreal.
David Foster Wallace
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I had, by thirteen, developed a sort of Taoist hubris about my ability to control via non-control.
David Foster Wallace
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I do things like get in a taxi and say, The library, and step on it.
David Foster Wallace
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Fiction is about what it is to be a human being.
David Foster Wallace
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Does somebody have an explanation why there's human flesh on the hall window upstairs?
David Foster Wallace
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What teachers and the administration in that era never seemed to see was that the mental work of what they called daydreaming often required more effort and concentration than it would have taken simply to listen in class. Laziness is not the issue. It is just not the work dictated by the administration.
David Foster Wallace
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Look, man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?
David Foster Wallace
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It now lately sometimes seemed a black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe.
David Foster Wallace
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Real leaders are people who “help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.
David Foster Wallace
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Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn't enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they're not even very good.
David Foster Wallace
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