Quote

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

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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
Feelings
Curious
Else
Loneliness
Around
Mets
Even
Lonely
Something
Missing
Never
Goes
Like
Somebody
Feeling
Explain

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You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice.
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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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I'd like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time, instead of having to go back in my head and enjoy them.
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There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says 'Morning, boys. How's the water?' And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes 'What the hell is water?'
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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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It’s a very American illness, the idea of giving yourself away entirely to the idea of working in order to achieve some sort of brass ring that usually involves people feeling some way about you – I mean, people wonder why we walk around feeling alienated and lonely and stressed out.
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I think the only thing for me, the tricky thing with the footnotes, is that they are an irritant, and they require a little extra work, and so they either have to be really germane or they have to be kind of fun to read.
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You can be shaped, or you can be broken. There is not much in between. Try to learn. Be coachable. Try to learn from everybody, especially those who fail. This is hard. ... How promising you are as a Student of the Game is a function of what you can pay attention to without running away.
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I do things like get in a taxi and say, The library, and step on it.
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Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes.
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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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She wanted only tall smooth bottles whose labels spoke of Proof.
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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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Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic? I give. You get someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog.
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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.
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Good writing isn’t a science. It’s an art, and the horizon is infinite. You can always get better.
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life's endless war against the self you cannot live without.
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What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.
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It's probably hard to feel any sort of Romantic spiritual connection to nature when you have to make your living from it.
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