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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
Help
Helping
Ethel
Covers
Screaming
Singing
Everybody
Acting

More quotes by 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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Dostoevski informs everybody or he ought to.
David Foster Wallace
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You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
David Foster Wallace
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I believe I want adult sanity, which seems to me the only unalloyed form of heroism available today.
David Foster Wallace
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Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere Mary went, the lights became erratic.
David Foster Wallace
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In the broadest possible sense, writing well means to communicate clearly and interestingly and in a way that feels alive to the reader. Where there’s some kind of relationship between the writer and the reader - even though it’s mediated by a kind of text - there’s an electricity about it.
David Foster Wallace
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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.
David Foster Wallace
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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.
David Foster Wallace
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...most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking.
David Foster Wallace
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Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut off David Lynch is interested in the ear.
David Foster Wallace
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No single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.
David Foster Wallace
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Many people in America throw the term fascism around, particularly for Middle-Eastern terrorists, but in fact what fascism really is is a close alliance between a unitary executive and a state and large corporations and a state.
David Foster Wallace
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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.
David Foster Wallace
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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.
David Foster Wallace
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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.
David Foster Wallace
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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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Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.
David Foster Wallace
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Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes.
David Foster Wallace
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Mediocrity is contextual.
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.
David Foster Wallace