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My worst character flaw that I'm conscious of is that I tend to think my way into circles instead of resolving anything. It's paralyzing and boring for people around me.
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
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Ithica
New York
David Wallace
Think
Tend
Thinking
Conscious
People
Instead
Paralyzing
Worst
Resolving
Around
Flaw
Character
Flaws
Anything
Circles
Way
Boring
More quotes by David Foster Wallace
Almost anything that you pay close, direct attention to becomes interesting.
David Foster Wallace
People, unless they're paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority.
David Foster Wallace
We are not dead but asleep, dreaming of ourselves.
David Foster Wallace
In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.
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
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
The reason ... our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down.
David Foster Wallace
The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.
David Foster Wallace
Certain sincerely devout and spiritually advanced people believe that the God of their understanding helps them find parking places and gives them advice on Mass. Lottery numbers.
David Foster Wallace
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?
David Foster Wallace
...the sun would leave my sky if I couldn't assume you'd simply come and tell me you were sad.
David Foster Wallace
All I'm saying is that it's shortsighted to blame TV. It's simply another symptom. TV didn't invent our aesthetic childishness here any more than the Manhattan Project invented aggression.
David Foster Wallace
Many people in America throw the term fascism around, particularly for Middle-Eastern terrorists, but in fact what fascism really is is a close alliance between a unitary executive and a state and large corporations and a state.
David Foster Wallace
Progressive liberals seem incapable of stating the obvious truth: that we who are well off should be willing to share more of what we have with poor people not for the poor people's sake but for our own i.e., we should share what we have in order to become less narrow and frightened and lonely and self-centered people.
David Foster Wallace
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.
David Foster Wallace
I had, by thirteen, developed a sort of Taoist hubris about my ability to control via non-control.
David Foster Wallace
It's like a fugue of evaded responsibility.
David Foster Wallace
Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere Mary went, the lights became erratic.
David Foster Wallace
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.
David Foster Wallace
Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself.
David Foster Wallace
