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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
Loneliness
Interesting
Persons
Thing
Anesthetic
Anesthetics
Desperate

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My bones are ringing the way sometimes people say their ears are ringing, I'm so tired.
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I don't want to hurt myself. I want to stop hurting.
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Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.
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Te Occidere Possunt Sed Te Edere Non Possunt Nefas Est (They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier).
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So yo then man what's your story?
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It feels intensely twisted to see reigning industry queen Jenna Jameson chilling out at the Vivid booth in Jordaches and a latex bustier and to know already that she has a tattoo of a sundered valentine with the tagline Heart Breaker on her right buttock and a tiny hairless ole just left of her anus.
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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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No single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.
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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.
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Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have much harder, more tedious or painful lives than I do, overall.
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TV's real agenda is to be liked, because if you like what you're seeing, you'll stay tuned. TV is completely unabashed about this it's its sole raison.
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We're not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader's own life outside the story changes the story.
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He said she went around with her feelings out in front of her with an arm around the feelings' windpipe and a Glock 9mm. to the feelings' temple like a terrorist with a hostage, daring you to shoot.
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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.
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It's like a fugue of evaded responsibility.
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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.
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The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush.
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I miss everyone. I can remember being young and feeling a thing and identifying it as homesickness, and then thinking well now that’s odd, isn’t it, because I was home, all the time. What on earth are we to make of that?
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What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves. They've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.
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I have filled 3 Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me.
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