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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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David Foster Wallace
Age: 45 †
Born: 1962
Born: February 21
Died: 2008
Died: February 12
Author
Essayist
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Ithica
New York
David Wallace
Unpleasant
Realities
Revealed
Irony
Rules
Debunked
Art
Diagnoses
Reality
Diagnosed
Problem
Diagnosis
More quotes by David Foster Wallace
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
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
The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.
David Foster Wallace
It’s a very American illness, the idea of giving yourself away entirely to the idea of working in order to achieve some sort of brass ring that usually involves people feeling some way about you – I mean, people wonder why we walk around feeling alienated and lonely and stressed out.
David Foster Wallace
The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the wall, during the first eight pages.
David Foster Wallace
We all suffer alone in the real world. True empathy's impossible. But if a piece of fiction can alow us imaginatively to identify with a character's pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with their own. This is nourishing, redemptive we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple.
David Foster Wallace
Rap's conscious response to the poverty and oppression of U.S. blacks is like some hideous parody of sixties black pride.
David Foster Wallace
She had a brainy girls discomfort about her own beauty and its effects on folks.
David Foster Wallace
the psychological need to believe that others take you as seriously as you take yourself. There is nothing particularly wrong with it, as psychological needs go, but yet of course we should always remember that a deep need for anything from other people makes us easy pickings.
David Foster Wallace
Think of the old cliché about ‘the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.’ This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head.
David Foster Wallace
...the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.
David Foster Wallace
The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘Oh how banal.’
David Foster Wallace
Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he's devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It's hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.
David Foster Wallace
Some words have to be explicitly uttered, Lenore. Only by actually uttering certain words does one really DO what one SAYS. 'Love' is one of those words, performative words. Some words can literally make things real.
David Foster Wallace
I'm screaming for help and everybody's acting as if I'm singing Ethel Merman covers.
David Foster Wallace
Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.
David Foster Wallace
I am not what you see and hear.
David Foster Wallace
American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.
David Foster Wallace
I like the fans’ sound at night. Do you? It’s like somebody big far away goes like: it’sOKit’sOKit’sOKit’sOK, over and over. From very far away.
David Foster Wallace
I will probably write an hour a day and spend eight hours a day biting my knuckle and worrying about not writing.
David Foster Wallace
