Quote

To experience commitment as the loss of options, a type of death, the death of childhood's limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress-this will happen, mark me. Childhood's end.

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
Experience
Mark
Death
Childhood
Happens
Choice
Ends
Possibility
Duress
Without
Loss
Limitless
Type
Options
Happen
Flattery
Choices
Commitment

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Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.
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Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.
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She had a brainy girls discomfort about her own beauty and its effects on folks.
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Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself.
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Almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer 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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I felt, as I became a later and later bloomer, alienated not just from my own recalcitrant glabrous little body but in a way from the whole elemental exterior I'd come to see as my co-conspirator.
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There is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness.
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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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You can be shaped, or you can be broken. There is not much in between. Try to learn. Be coachable. Try to learn from everybody, especially those who fail. This is hard. ... How promising you are as a Student of the Game is a function of what you can pay attention to without running away.
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What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.
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I'm screaming for help and everybody's acting as if I'm singing Ethel Merman covers.
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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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It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.
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I like the fans’ sound at night. Do you? It’s like somebody big far away goes like: it’sOKit’sOKit’sOKit’sOK, over and over. From very far away.
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Good writing isn’t a science. It’s an art, and the horizon is infinite. You can always get better.
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Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he's devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It's hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.
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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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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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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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