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...Genuine pathological openness is about as seductive as Tourette's Syndrome.

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
Pathological
Syndromes
Syndrome
Seductive
Openness
Genuine
Tourette

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What TV is extremely good at - and realize that this is 'all it does' - is discerning what large numbers of people think they want, and supplying it.
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Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere Mary went, the lights became erratic.
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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.
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Most of us will still take nihilism over neanderthalism.
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I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I'm not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I.
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The sound of wind had become, for me, silence. When it went away, I was left with the squeak of the blood in my head and the aural glitter of all those little eardrum hairs quivering like a drunk in withdrawal.
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Writing fiction takes me out of time. I sit down and the clock will not exist for me for a few hours. That’s probably as close to immortal as we’ll ever get.
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Does somebody have an explanation why there's human flesh on the hall window upstairs?
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I read,' I say. 'I study and read. I bet I've read everything you've read. Don't think I haven't. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, The library, and step on it.
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Fiction is about what it is to be a human being.
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Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut off David Lynch is interested in the ear.
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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.
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I have filled 3 Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me.
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It’s a very American illness, the idea of giving yourself away entirely to the idea of working in order to achieve some sort of brass ring that usually involves people feeling some way about you – I mean, people wonder why we walk around feeling alienated and lonely and stressed out.
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My bones are ringing the way sometimes people say their ears are ringing, I'm so tired.
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Truly decent, innocent people can be taxing to be around.
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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.
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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.
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Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever.
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Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself.
David Foster Wallace