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Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.

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
Way
Identical
Deep
Everybody
Secret
Belief
Everyone
Bipolar
Else
Jest
Different
Unspoken

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Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere Mary went, the lights became erratic.
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Some words have to be explicitly uttered, Lenore. Only by actually uttering certain words does one really DO what one SAYS. 'Love' is one of those words, performative words. Some words can literally make things real.
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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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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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If some people read my fiction and see it as fundamentally about philosophical ideas, what it probably means is that these are pieces where the characters are not as alive and interesting as I meant them to be.
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Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move.
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One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.
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There are no choices without personal freedom, Buckeroo. It's not us who are dead inside. These things you find so weak and contemptible in us - these are just the hazards of being free.
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I had, by thirteen, developed a sort of Taoist hubris about my ability to control via non-control.
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Here is how to handle being a feral prodigy.
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Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.
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The severing of an established connection is exponentially more painful than the rejection of an attempted connection.
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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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Kafka's evocations are, rather, unconscious and almost sub-archetypal, the little-kid stuff from which myths derive this is why we tend to call even his weirdest stories nightmarish rather than surreal.
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The fun of reading as an exchange between consciousnesses, a way for human beings to talk to each other about stuff we can't normally talk about.
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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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I'm very bright, but I'm terrified of sounding like someone who thinks he's very bright-because those people are assholes.
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Worship power - you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever ore power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart - you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.
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It feels intensely twisted to see reigning industry queen Jenna Jameson chilling out at the Vivid booth in Jordaches and a latex bustier and to know already that she has a tattoo of a sundered valentine with the tagline Heart Breaker on her right buttock and a tiny hairless ole just left of her anus.
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Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.
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