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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
Live
Jest
Expectation
Waves
Wave
Expectations
Talent
Either
Forever
Receding

More quotes by David Foster Wallace

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the psychological need to believe that others take you as seriously as you take yourself. There is nothing particularly wrong with it, as psychological needs go, but yet of course we should always remember that a deep need for anything from other people makes us easy pickings.
David Foster Wallace
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Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.
David Foster Wallace
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To experience commitment as the loss of options, a type of death, the death of childhood's limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress-this will happen, mark me. Childhood's end.
David Foster Wallace
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I have always tried to avoid talking to pretty girls, because pretty girls have a vicious effect on me in which every part of my brain is shut down except for the part that says unbelievably stupid things and the part that is aware that I am saying unbelievably stupid things.
David Foster Wallace
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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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I don't think writers are any smarter than other people. I think they may be more compelling in their stupidity, or in their confusion.
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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life's endless war against the self you cannot live without.
David Foster Wallace
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Real leaders are people who “help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.
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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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.
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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So yo then man what's your story?
David Foster Wallace
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I find in myself a need to get very away.
David Foster Wallace
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The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates.
David Foster Wallace
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The severing of an established connection is exponentially more painful than the rejection of an attempted connection.
David Foster Wallace
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Mediocrity is contextual.
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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That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we're all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine.
David Foster Wallace
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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.
David Foster Wallace