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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
Writer
Ithica
New York
David Wallace
Around
Flaw
Character
Flaws
Anything
Circles
Way
Boring
Think
Tend
Thinking
Conscious
People
Instead
Paralyzing
Worst
Resolving
More quotes by David Foster Wallace
...the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.
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Truly decent, innocent people can be taxing to be around.
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Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.
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We're not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader's own life outside the story changes the story.
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It now lately sometimes seemed a black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe.
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If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important - if you want to operate on your default-setting - then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying.
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.
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Hear this or not, as you will. Learn it now, or later -- the world has time. Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui -- these are the true hero's enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real.
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One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.
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Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.
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Most of us will still take nihilism over neanderthalism.
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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.
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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
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
Fiction is about what it is to be a human being.
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sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them.
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What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love? What if the temple comes to Mohammed? What if you just love? without deciding? You just do: you see her and in that instant are lost to sober account-keeping and cannot choose but to love?
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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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Some words have to be explicitly uttered, Lenore. Only by actually uttering certain words does one really DO what one SAYS. 'Love' is one of those words, performative words. Some words can literally make things real.
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