Quote

Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever.

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
Forever
Receding
Live
Jest
Expectation
Waves
Wave
Expectations
Talent
Either

More quotes by David Foster Wallace

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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.
David Foster Wallace
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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.
David Foster Wallace
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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.
David Foster Wallace
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The point of books is to combat loneliness.
David Foster Wallace
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Kafka's evocations are, rather, unconscious and almost sub-archetypal, the little-kid stuff from which myths derive this is why we tend to call even his weirdest stories nightmarish rather than surreal.
David Foster Wallace
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The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, 'then' what do we do?
David Foster Wallace
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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
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Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.
David Foster Wallace
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Worship your body, beauty, and sexual allure and you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.
David Foster Wallace
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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
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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.
David Foster Wallace
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Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut off David Lynch is interested in the ear.
David Foster Wallace
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The fun of reading as an exchange between consciousnesses, a way for human beings to talk to each other about stuff we can't normally talk about.
David Foster Wallace
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life's endless war against the self you cannot live without.
David Foster Wallace
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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
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I had, by thirteen, developed a sort of Taoist hubris about my ability to control via non-control.
David Foster Wallace
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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.
David Foster Wallace
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Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.
David Foster Wallace
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What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love? What if the temple comes to Mohammed? What if you just love? without deciding? You just do: you see her and in that instant are lost to sober account-keeping and cannot choose but to love?
David Foster Wallace
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Fiction, poetry, music...these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.
David Foster Wallace