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The individual's right to pursue his own vision of the best ration of pleasure to pain: utterly sacrosanct.

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
Best
Sacrosanct
Right
Rations
Utterly
Pursue
Vision
Pleasure
Pain
Individual
Ration

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The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush.
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Most of us will still take nihilism over neanderthalism.
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I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I'm not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I.
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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?
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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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It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art.
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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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Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.
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People, unless they're paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority.
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Hear this or not, as you will. Learn it now, or later -- the world has time. Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui -- these are the true hero's enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real.
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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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....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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Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move.
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She had a brainy girls discomfort about her own beauty and its effects on folks.
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The point of books is to combat loneliness.
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The man who knows his limitations, has none.
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Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.
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What TV is extremely good at - and realize that this is 'all it does' - is discerning what large numbers of people think they want, and supplying it.
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My bones are ringing the way sometimes people say their ears are ringing, I'm so tired.
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Many people in America throw the term fascism around, particularly for Middle-Eastern terrorists, but in fact what fascism really is is a close alliance between a unitary executive and a state and large corporations and a state.
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