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I read,' I say. 'I study and read. I bet I've read everything you've read. Don't think I haven't. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, The library, and step on it.

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
Reading
Drives
Read
Library
Everything
Wear
Book
Havens
Spines
Things
Haven
Taxi
Think
Step
Libraries
Thinking
Steps
Consume
Like
Study
Spine

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We are not dead but asleep, dreaming of ourselves.
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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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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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Dieting makes me want to murder everyone around me.
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I think the only thing for me, the tricky thing with the footnotes, is that they are an irritant, and they require a little extra work, and so they either have to be really germane or they have to be kind of fun to read.
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....there is an ending [to Infinite Jest] as far as I'm concerned. Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an end can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame. If no such convergence or projection occured to you, then the book's failed for you.
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Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.
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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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Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.
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Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.
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The point of books is to combat loneliness.
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The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates.
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Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn't enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they're not even very good.
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Probably the most dangerous thing about college education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract arguments inside my head instead of simply paying attention to what's going on right in front of me. TC mark
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I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it.
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Most of us will still take nihilism over neanderthalism.
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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.
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Footnote: 79) The anchor is gigantic and must weigh a hundred tons, and -- delightfully -- it really is anchor-shaped, i.e. the same shape as anchors in tattoos.
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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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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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