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Most of us will still take nihilism over neanderthalism.

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
Nihilism
Stills
Still
Take

More quotes by 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.
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Think of the old cliché about ‘the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.’ This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head.
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Here is how to handle being a feral prodigy.
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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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There's a weird kind of paradox that the more expensive the vacation is, the more potentially anxiety-producing it is.
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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.
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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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The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates.
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We will, of course, without hesitation use art to parody, ridicule, debunk, or criticize ideologies.
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Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.
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Pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. per se.
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That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we're all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine.
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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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You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice.
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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.
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You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
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No single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.
David Foster Wallace
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It’s a very American illness, the idea of giving yourself away entirely to the idea of working in order to achieve some sort of brass ring that usually involves people feeling some way about you – I mean, people wonder why we walk around feeling alienated and lonely and stressed out.
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...Genuine pathological openness is about as seductive as Tourette's Syndrome.
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You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
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