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The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.

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
Interesting
Persons
Thing
Anesthetic
Anesthetics
Desperate
Loneliness

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I do things like get in a taxi and say, The library, and step on it.
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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.
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Good writing isn’t a science. It’s an art, and the horizon is infinite. You can always get better.
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...the sun would leave my sky if I couldn't assume you'd simply come and tell me you were sad.
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People, unless they're paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority.
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I find in myself a need to get very away.
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Almost anything that you pay close, direct attention to becomes interesting.
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life's endless war against the self you cannot live without.
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I am not what you see and hear.
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Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move.
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There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says 'Morning, boys. How's the water?' And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes 'What the hell is water?'
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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?
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I believe I want adult sanity, which seems to me the only unalloyed form of heroism available today.
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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.
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Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude - but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense.
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We're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we've never even met?
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There's a weird kind of paradox that the more expensive the vacation is, the more potentially anxiety-producing it is.
David Foster Wallace
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To be a mass tourist, for me,...is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.
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Dostoevski informs everybody or he ought to.
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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.
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