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life's endless war against the self you cannot live without.

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
Endless
War
Cannot
Live
Without
Self
Life

More quotes by David Foster Wallace

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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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Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.
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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.
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People, unless they're paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority.
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If Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it.
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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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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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....there is an ending [to Infinite Jest] as far as I'm concerned. Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an end can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame. If no such convergence or projection occured to you, then the book's failed for you.
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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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...the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.
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Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut off David Lynch is interested in the ear.
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...morning is the soul's night.
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That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we're all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine.
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We will, of course, without hesitation use art to parody, ridicule, debunk, or criticize ideologies.
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I find in myself a need to get very away.
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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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There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration.
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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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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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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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