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I'm screaming for help and everybody's acting as if I'm singing Ethel Merman covers.

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
Helping
Ethel
Covers
Screaming
Singing
Everybody
Acting
Help

More quotes by David Foster Wallace

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It takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak.
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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The individual's right to pursue his own vision of the best ration of pleasure to pain: utterly sacrosanct.
David Foster Wallace
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Lucky people develop a relationship with a certain kind of art that becomes spiritual, almost religious, and doesn’t mean, you know, church stuff, but it means you’re just never the same.
David Foster Wallace
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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.
David Foster Wallace
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Hear this or not, as you will. Learn it now, or later -- the world has time. Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui -- these are the true hero's enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real.
David Foster Wallace
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Our attachments are our temple, what we worship, no? What we give ourselves to, what we invest with faith. . . . Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care.
David Foster Wallace
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Look, man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?
David Foster Wallace
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People, unless they're paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority.
David Foster Wallace
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Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T true is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it.
David Foster Wallace
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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.
David Foster Wallace
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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).
David Foster Wallace
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Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever.
David Foster Wallace
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We will, of course, without hesitation use art to parody, ridicule, debunk, or criticize ideologies.
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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Stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.
David Foster Wallace
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You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
David Foster Wallace
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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.
David Foster Wallace
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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.
David Foster Wallace
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TV's real agenda is to be liked, because if you like what you're seeing, you'll stay tuned. TV is completely unabashed about this it's its sole raison.
David Foster Wallace