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I do things like get in a taxi and say, The library, and step on it.
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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Ithica
New York
David Wallace
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More quotes by David Foster Wallace
My personal belief is that because technology and economic logic has gotten so sophisticated, cruelties can be perpetrated now that would have been unimaginable two or three hundred years ago.
David Foster Wallace
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.
David Foster Wallace
I'd tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear
David Foster Wallace
Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn't enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they're not even very good.
David Foster Wallace
Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T true is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it.
David Foster Wallace
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.
David Foster Wallace
All I'm saying is that it's shortsighted to blame TV. It's simply another symptom. TV didn't invent our aesthetic childishness here any more than the Manhattan Project invented aggression.
David Foster Wallace
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.
David Foster Wallace
My worst character flaw that I'm conscious of is that I tend to think my way into circles instead of resolving anything. It's paralyzing and boring for people around me.
David Foster Wallace
Progressive liberals seem incapable of stating the obvious truth: that we who are well off should be willing to share more of what we have with poor people not for the poor people's sake but for our own i.e., we should share what we have in order to become less narrow and frightened and lonely and self-centered people.
David Foster Wallace
In fact, the likeliest reason why so many of us care so little about politics is that modern politicians makes us sad, hurt us deep down in ways that are hard even to name, much less talk about.
David Foster Wallace
You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
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
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'm very bright, but I'm terrified of sounding like someone who thinks he's very bright-because those people are assholes.
David Foster Wallace
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.
David Foster Wallace
But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars - compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things.
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
I'd like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time, instead of having to go back in my head and enjoy them.
David Foster Wallace
It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art.
David Foster Wallace