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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

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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
Seems
Unlimited
Give
Prefer
Need
Various
Giving
Levels
Needs
Secret
People
American
Experience
Virtually
Away
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I want to tell you,' the voice on the phone said. 'My head is filled with things to say.' ... 'I don't mind,' Hal said softly. 'I could wait forever.' 'That's what you think,' the voice said. The connection was cut.
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The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘Oh how banal.’
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Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.
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No single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.
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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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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 had, by thirteen, developed a sort of Taoist hubris about my ability to control via non-control.
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In the broadest possible sense, writing well means to communicate clearly and interestingly and in a way that feels alive to the reader. Where there’s some kind of relationship between the writer and the reader - even though it’s mediated by a kind of text - there’s an electricity about it.
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Fiction, poetry, music...these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.
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I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art.
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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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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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Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever.
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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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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.
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Dieting makes me want to murder everyone around me.
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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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Think of the old cliché about ‘the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.’ This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head.
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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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