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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
Author
Essayist
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Ithica
New York
David Wallace
Nothing
Important
Engineer
Engineers
Almost
Happens
Ever

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Mediocrity is contextual.
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I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it.
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I believe I want adult sanity, which seems to me the only unalloyed form of heroism available today.
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Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.
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The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates.
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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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The point here is ... to be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.
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The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.
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There is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness.
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Worship your body, beauty, and sexual allure and you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.
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The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.
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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.
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Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move.
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One paradox of professional writing is that books written solely for money and/or acclaim will almost never be good enough to garner either.
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Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn't enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they're not even very good.
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Stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.
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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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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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The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush.
David Foster Wallace
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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.
David Foster Wallace