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Almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it.
David Foster Wallace
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David Foster Wallace
Age: 45 †
Born: 1962
Born: February 21
Died: 2008
Died: February 12
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University Teacher
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Ithica
New York
David Wallace
Engineers
Almost
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Nothing
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Engineer
More quotes by David Foster Wallace
One paradox of professional writing is that books written solely for money and/or acclaim will almost never be good enough to garner either.
David Foster Wallace
Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever.
David Foster Wallace
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.
David Foster Wallace
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.
David Foster Wallace
Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere Mary went, the lights became erratic.
David Foster Wallace
I believe I want adult sanity, which seems to me the only unalloyed form of heroism available today.
David Foster Wallace
We will, of course, without hesitation use art to parody, ridicule, debunk, or criticize ideologies.
David Foster Wallace
Our attachments are our temple, what we worship, no? What we give ourselves to, what we invest with faith. . . . Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care.
David Foster Wallace
He said she went around with her feelings out in front of her with an arm around the feelings' windpipe and a Glock 9mm. to the feelings' temple like a terrorist with a hostage, daring you to shoot.
David Foster Wallace
You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice.
David Foster Wallace
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.
David Foster Wallace
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.
David Foster Wallace
Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes.
David Foster Wallace
The integrity of my sleep has been forever compromised, sir.
David Foster Wallace
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.
David Foster Wallace
In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.
David Foster Wallace
Dostoevski informs everybody or he ought to.
David Foster Wallace
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.
David Foster Wallace
We are not dead but asleep, dreaming of ourselves.
David Foster Wallace
Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T true is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it.
David Foster Wallace
