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In fact, the likeliest reason why so many of us care so little about politics is that modern politicians makes us sad, hurt us deep down in ways that are hard even to name, much less talk about.
David Foster Wallace
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David Foster Wallace
Age: 45 †
Born: 1962
Born: February 21
Died: 2008
Died: February 12
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More quotes by David Foster Wallace
Almost anything that you pay close, direct attention to becomes interesting.
David Foster Wallace
Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.
David Foster Wallace
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
Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude - but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense.
David Foster Wallace
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
If some people read my fiction and see it as fundamentally about philosophical ideas, what it probably means is that these are pieces where the characters are not as alive and interesting as I meant them to be.
David Foster Wallace
You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
David Foster Wallace
Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.
David Foster Wallace
The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.
David Foster Wallace
I don't want to hurt myself. I want to stop hurting.
David Foster Wallace
If Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it.
David Foster Wallace
People, unless they're paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority.
David Foster Wallace
Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have much harder, more tedious or painful lives than I do, overall.
David Foster Wallace
So yo then man what's your story?
David Foster Wallace
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
The assumption that you everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.
David Foster Wallace
Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.
David Foster Wallace
There are no choices without personal freedom, Buckeroo. It's not us who are dead inside. These things you find so weak and contemptible in us - these are just the hazards of being free.
David Foster Wallace
....there is an ending [to Infinite Jest] as far as I'm concerned. Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an end can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame. If no such convergence or projection occured to you, then the book's failed for you.
David Foster Wallace
You can be shaped, or you can be broken. There is not much in between. Try to learn. Be coachable. Try to learn from everybody, especially those who fail. This is hard. ... How promising you are as a Student of the Game is a function of what you can pay attention to without running away.
David Foster Wallace
