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

More quotes by David Foster Wallace

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...the sun would leave my sky if I couldn't assume you'd simply come and tell me you were sad.
David Foster Wallace
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He said she went around with her feelings out in front of her with an arm around the feelings' windpipe and a Glock 9mm. to the feelings' temple like a terrorist with a hostage, daring you to shoot.
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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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...morning is the soul's night.
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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We all suffer alone in the real world. True empathy's impossible. But if a piece of fiction can alow us imaginatively to identify with a character's pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with their own. This is nourishing, redemptive we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple.
David Foster Wallace
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I want to tell you,' the voice on the phone said. 'My head is filled with things to say.' ... 'I don't mind,' Hal said softly. 'I could wait forever.' 'That's what you think,' the voice said. The connection was cut.
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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She wanted only tall smooth bottles whose labels spoke of Proof.
David Foster Wallace
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sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them.
David Foster Wallace
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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.
David Foster Wallace
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Dieting makes me want to murder everyone around me.
David Foster Wallace
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I have filled 3 Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me.
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.
David Foster Wallace
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The fun of reading as an exchange between consciousnesses, a way for human beings to talk to each other about stuff we can't normally talk about.
David Foster Wallace
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I'm not afraid of new things. I'm just afraid of feeling alone even when there's somebody else there. I'm afraid of feeling bad. Maybe that's selfish, but it's the way I feel.
David Foster Wallace
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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
David Foster Wallace
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What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.
David Foster Wallace
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The point here is ... to be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.
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