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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.
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
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Ithica
New York
David Wallace
Home
Doubling
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Voting
Staying
Vote
Value
Either
Values
Tacitly
Reality
Diehard
More quotes by David Foster Wallace
Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere Mary went, the lights became erratic.
David Foster Wallace
The way I think about things and experience things is not particularly linear, and it's not orderly, and it's not pyramidical, and there are a lot of loops.
David Foster Wallace
Stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.
David Foster Wallace
Dostoevski informs everybody or he ought to.
David Foster Wallace
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.
David Foster Wallace
What teachers and the administration in that era never seemed to see was that the mental work of what they called daydreaming often required more effort and concentration than it would have taken simply to listen in class. Laziness is not the issue. It is just not the work dictated by the administration.
David Foster Wallace
In fact, the likeliest reason why so many of us care so little about politics is that modern politicians makes us sad, hurt us deep down in ways that are hard even to name, much less talk about.
David Foster Wallace
Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he's devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It's hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.
David Foster Wallace
American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.
David Foster Wallace
I felt, as I became a later and later bloomer, alienated not just from my own recalcitrant glabrous little body but in a way from the whole elemental exterior I'd come to see as my co-conspirator.
David Foster Wallace
For me, boviscopophobia is an even stronger motive than semi-agoraphobia for staying on the ship when we're in port.
David Foster Wallace
The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.
David Foster Wallace
No single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.
David Foster Wallace
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.
David Foster Wallace
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?
David Foster Wallace
The man who knows his limitations, has none.
David Foster Wallace
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
The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, 'then' what do we do?
David Foster Wallace
Here is how to handle being a feral prodigy.
David Foster Wallace
There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact - in its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of social equality for social equality itself - of vastly more help to conservatives and the US status quo than traditional SNOOT prescriptions ever were.
David Foster Wallace
