Quote

There are no choices without personal freedom, Buckeroo. It's not us who are dead inside. These things you find so weak and contemptible in us - these are just the hazards of being free.

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
Things
Inside
Personal
Dead
Choices
Freedom
Free
Contemptible
Find
Hazards
Without
Weak

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We will, of course, without hesitation use art to parody, ridicule, debunk, or criticize ideologies.
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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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Pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. per se.
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This is so American, man: either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it.
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The reason ... our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down.
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Almost anything that you pay close, direct attention to becomes interesting.
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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.
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I'm not afraid of new things. I'm just afraid of feeling alone even when there's somebody else there. I'm afraid of feeling bad. Maybe that's selfish, but it's the way I feel.
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Almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it.
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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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Worship power - you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever ore power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart - you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.
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I don't want to hurt myself. I want to stop hurting.
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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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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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I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art.
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It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.
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Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic? I give. You get someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog.
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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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In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.
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