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Mediocrity is contextual.

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
Contextual
Mediocrity

More quotes by David Foster Wallace

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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
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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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Does somebody have an explanation why there's human flesh on the hall window upstairs?
David Foster Wallace
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The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush.
David Foster Wallace
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Truly decent, innocent people can be taxing to be around.
David Foster Wallace
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It takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak.
David Foster Wallace
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I'm not afraid of new things. I'm just afraid of feeling alone even when there's somebody else there. I'm afraid of feeling bad. Maybe that's selfish, but it's the way I feel.
David Foster Wallace
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Here is how to handle being a feral prodigy.
David Foster Wallace
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Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes.
David Foster Wallace
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You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice.
David Foster Wallace
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If Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it.
David Foster Wallace
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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
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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.
David Foster Wallace
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Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move.
David Foster Wallace
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If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important - if you want to operate on your default-setting - then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying.
David Foster Wallace
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There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says 'Morning, boys. How's the water?' And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes 'What the hell is water?'
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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I find in myself a need to get very away.
David Foster Wallace
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This is so American, man: either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it.
David Foster Wallace
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Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.
David Foster Wallace