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I cannot say what color Lenore Beadsman’s eyes are I cannot look at them they are the sun to me.

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
Cannot
Look
Looks
Sun
Color
Eyes
Eye

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To be a mass tourist, for me,...is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.
David Foster Wallace
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The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.
David Foster Wallace
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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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We're not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader's own life outside the story changes the story.
David Foster Wallace
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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.
David Foster Wallace
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Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.
David Foster Wallace
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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.
David Foster Wallace
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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.
David Foster Wallace
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My personal belief is that because technology and economic logic has gotten so sophisticated, cruelties can be perpetrated now that would have been unimaginable two or three hundred years ago.
David Foster Wallace
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I was trained mainly as a short story writer and that's how I started writing, but I've also become very interested in non-fiction, just because I got a couple of magazine jobs when I was really poor and needed the money and it turned out that non-fiction was much more interesting than I thought it was.
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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.
David Foster Wallace
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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.
David Foster Wallace
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Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.
David Foster Wallace
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There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration.
David Foster Wallace
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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.
David Foster Wallace
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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.
David Foster Wallace
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Fiction, poetry, music...these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.
David Foster Wallace
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Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself.
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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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.
David Foster Wallace