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

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Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move.
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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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But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars - compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things.
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The man who knows his limitations, has none.
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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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Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic? I give. You get someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog.
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The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘Oh how banal.’
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Almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it.
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The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush.
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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.
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Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.
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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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It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.
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There is no hatred in my love for you. Only a sadness I feel all the more strongly for my inability to explain or describe it.
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My bones are ringing the way sometimes people say their ears are ringing, I'm so tired.
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I don't think writers are any smarter than other people. I think they may be more compelling in their stupidity, or in their confusion.
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Worship your body, beauty, and sexual allure and you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.
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Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut off David Lynch is interested in the ear.
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It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art.
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Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes.
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