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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
Either
Forever
Receding
Live
Jest
Expectation
Waves
Wave
Expectations
Talent

More quotes by David Foster Wallace

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I'm screaming for help and everybody's acting as if I'm singing Ethel Merman covers.
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Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move.
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She wanted only tall smooth bottles whose labels spoke of Proof.
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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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I was trained mainly as a short story writer and that's how I started writing, but I've also become very interested in non-fiction, just because I got a couple of magazine jobs when I was really poor and needed the money and it turned out that non-fiction was much more interesting than I thought it was.
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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.
David Foster Wallace
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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.
David Foster Wallace
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You can be shaped, or you can be broken. There is not much in between. Try to learn. Be coachable. Try to learn from everybody, especially those who fail. This is hard. ... How promising you are as a Student of the Game is a function of what you can pay attention to without running away.
David Foster Wallace
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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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People, unless they're paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority.
David Foster Wallace
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...the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.
David Foster Wallace
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Does somebody have an explanation why there's human flesh on the hall window upstairs?
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life's endless war against the self you cannot live without.
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I find in myself a need to get very away.
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I don't want to hurt myself. I want to stop hurting.
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sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them.
David Foster Wallace
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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.
David Foster Wallace
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So yo then man what's your story?
David Foster Wallace
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My bones are ringing the way sometimes people say their ears are ringing, I'm so tired.
David Foster Wallace
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There is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness.
David Foster Wallace