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I believe I want adult sanity, which seems to me the only unalloyed form of heroism available today.

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
Seems
Today
Unalloyed
Believe
Heroism
Sanity
Adult
Available
Adults
Form

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This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn't engage anybody.
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Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.
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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.
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Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude - but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense.
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The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.
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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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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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Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself.
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It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art.
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It takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak.
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Does somebody have an explanation why there's human flesh on the hall window upstairs?
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There's a weird kind of paradox that the more expensive the vacation is, the more potentially anxiety-producing it is.
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Fiction, poetry, music...these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.
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Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.
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In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.
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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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There is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness.
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We're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we've never even met?
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If Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it.
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So yo then man what's your story?
David Foster Wallace