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

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every failure is also a victory.
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Fiction is about what it is to be a human being.
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Probably the most dangerous thing about college education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract arguments inside my head instead of simply paying attention to what's going on right in front of me. TC mark
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Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.
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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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Almost anything that you pay close, direct attention to becomes interesting.
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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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Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.
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I don't want to hurt myself. I want to stop hurting.
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My personal belief is that because technology and economic logic has gotten so sophisticated, cruelties can be perpetrated now that would have been unimaginable two or three hundred years ago.
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I will probably write an hour a day and spend eight hours a day biting my knuckle and worrying about not writing.
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Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.
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What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves. They've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.
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Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere Mary went, the lights became erratic.
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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.
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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.
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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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You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
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