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Truly decent, innocent people can be taxing to be around.

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
Around
People
Taxing
Decent
Innocent
Truly

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We will, of course, without hesitation use art to parody, ridicule, debunk, or criticize ideologies.
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I'd tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear
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We're not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader's own life outside the story changes the story.
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Footnote: 79) The anchor is gigantic and must weigh a hundred tons, and -- delightfully -- it really is anchor-shaped, i.e. the same shape as anchors in tattoos.
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The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.
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Almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it.
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The man who knows his limitations, has none.
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Worship power - you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever ore power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart - you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.
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You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
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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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If you worship power, you will feel weak and afraid, needing ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay.
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I believe I want adult sanity, which seems to me the only unalloyed form of heroism available today.
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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.
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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.
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The individual's right to pursue his own vision of the best ration of pleasure to pain: utterly sacrosanct.
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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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I'm screaming for help and everybody's acting as if I'm singing Ethel Merman covers.
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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.
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The reason ... our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down.
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Te Occidere Possunt Sed Te Edere Non Possunt Nefas Est (They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier).
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