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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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David Foster Wallace
Age: 45 †
Born: 1962
Born: February 21
Died: 2008
Died: February 12
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Novelist
University Teacher
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Ithica
New York
David Wallace
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More quotes by David Foster Wallace
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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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.’
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Here is how to handle being a feral prodigy.
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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.
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The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.
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Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.
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It's in the democratic citizen's nature to be like a leaf that doesn't believe in the tree it's part of.
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No single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.
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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).
David Foster Wallace
This is so American, man: either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it.
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I felt, as I became a later and later bloomer, alienated not just from my own recalcitrant glabrous little body but in a way from the whole elemental exterior I'd come to see as my co-conspirator.
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Say the whole point of love is to try to get your fingers through the holes in the lover's mask. To get some kind of hold on the mask, and who cares how you do it.
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Fiction is about what it is to be a human being.
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I think the only thing for me, the tricky thing with the footnotes, is that they are an irritant, and they require a little extra work, and so they either have to be really germane or they have to be kind of fun to read.
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Does somebody have an explanation why there's human flesh on the hall window upstairs?
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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.
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I'm very bright, but I'm terrified of sounding like someone who thinks he's very bright-because those people are assholes.
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Dostoevski informs everybody or he ought to.
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I cannot say what color Lenore Beadsman’s eyes are I cannot look at them they are the sun to me.
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For me, boviscopophobia is an even stronger motive than semi-agoraphobia for staying on the ship when we're in port.
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