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The assumption that you everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.

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
Like
Complacent
World
Consumer
Assumption
Consumers
Capitalism
Disease
Everyone
Else
Solipsism

More quotes by David Foster Wallace

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Pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. per se.
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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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Dostoevski informs everybody or he ought to.
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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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There's a weird kind of paradox that the more expensive the vacation is, the more potentially anxiety-producing it is.
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For me, boviscopophobia is an even stronger motive than semi-agoraphobia for staying on the ship when we're in port.
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It now lately sometimes seemed a black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe.
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She wanted only tall smooth bottles whose labels spoke of Proof.
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You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice.
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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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Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.
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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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No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.
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The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the wall, during the first eight pages.
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Stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.
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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 no hatred in my love for you. Only a sadness I feel all the more strongly for my inability to explain or describe it.
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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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It takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak.
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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