Quote

Real leaders are people who “help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.

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
Things
Harder
Laziness
People
Leader
Limitations
Help
Selfishness
Individual
Limitation
Fear
Overcome
Helping
Overcoming
Better
Leaders
Real
Weakness

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Dostoevski informs everybody or he ought to.
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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.
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Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever.
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The assumption that you everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.
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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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In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.
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I'm very bright, but I'm terrified of sounding like someone who thinks he's very bright-because those people are assholes.
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If Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it.
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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.
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It feels intensely twisted to see reigning industry queen Jenna Jameson chilling out at the Vivid booth in Jordaches and a latex bustier and to know already that she has a tattoo of a sundered valentine with the tagline Heart Breaker on her right buttock and a tiny hairless ole just left of her anus.
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The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.
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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).
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My worst character flaw that I'm conscious of is that I tend to think my way into circles instead of resolving anything. It's paralyzing and boring for people around me.
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I have filled 3 Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me.
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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.
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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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The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.
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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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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.
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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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