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Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.

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
Rather
Costs
Around
Affect
Humans
Loneliness
Allergic
People
Bear
Psychic
Lonely
Psychics
Tend
Strongly
Bears
Cost
Decline

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Almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it.
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The point of books is to combat loneliness.
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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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She wanted only tall smooth bottles whose labels spoke of Proof.
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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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The individual's right to pursue his own vision of the best ration of pleasure to pain: utterly sacrosanct.
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Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.
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Footnote: 79) The anchor is gigantic and must weigh a hundred tons, and -- delightfully -- it really is anchor-shaped, i.e. the same shape as anchors in tattoos.
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...the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.
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Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.
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So yo then man what's your story?
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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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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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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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I believe I want adult sanity, which seems to me the only unalloyed form of heroism available today.
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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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I have always tried to avoid talking to pretty girls, because pretty girls have a vicious effect on me in which every part of my brain is shut down except for the part that says unbelievably stupid things and the part that is aware that I am saying unbelievably stupid things.
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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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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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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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