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No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.

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
Central
Home
Struggle
Joke
Human
Results
Humans
Humanity
Endless
Self
Impossible
Jokes
Kafka
Really
Wonder
Appreciate
Horrific
Fact
Toward
Inseparable
Facts
Whose
Establish
Cannot
Journey

More quotes by David Foster Wallace

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I don't want to hurt myself. I want to stop hurting.
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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?
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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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I'm screaming for help and everybody's acting as if I'm singing Ethel Merman covers.
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every failure is also a victory.
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...Genuine pathological openness is about as seductive as Tourette's Syndrome.
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If some people read my fiction and see it as fundamentally about philosophical ideas, what it probably means is that these are pieces where the characters are not as alive and interesting as I meant them to be.
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I miss everyone. I can remember being young and feeling a thing and identifying it as homesickness, and then thinking well now that’s odd, isn’t it, because I was home, all the time. What on earth are we to make of that?
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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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Pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. per se.
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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.
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The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.
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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.
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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.
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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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Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes.
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The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates.
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Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.
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Dieting makes me want to murder everyone around me.
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I don't think writers are any smarter than other people. I think they may be more compelling in their stupidity, or in their confusion.
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