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

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Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.
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The sound of wind had become, for me, silence. When it went away, I was left with the squeak of the blood in my head and the aural glitter of all those little eardrum hairs quivering like a drunk in withdrawal.
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Do this: hate him for me after I die. I beg you. Dying request.
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Rap's conscious response to the poverty and oppression of U.S. blacks is like some hideous parody of sixties black pride.
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There is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness.
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This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn't engage anybody.
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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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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.
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Te Occidere Possunt Sed Te Edere Non Possunt Nefas Est (They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier).
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Think of the old cliché about ‘the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.’ This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head.
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The integrity of my sleep has been forever compromised, sir.
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The reason ... our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down.
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The individual's right to pursue his own vision of the best ration of pleasure to pain: utterly sacrosanct.
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...the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.
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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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If you worship power, you will feel weak and afraid, needing ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay.
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I'm not afraid of new things. I'm just afraid of feeling alone even when there's somebody else there. I'm afraid of feeling bad. Maybe that's selfish, but it's the way I feel.
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I have always tried to avoid talking to pretty girls, because pretty girls have a vicious effect on me in which every part of my brain is shut down except for the part that says unbelievably stupid things and the part that is aware that I am saying unbelievably stupid things.
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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 never, even for a moment, doubted what they’d told me. This is why it is that adults and even parents can, unwittingly, be cruel: they cannot imagine doubt’s complete absence. They have forgotten.
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