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I don't want to hurt myself. I want to stop hurting.

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
Hurting
Hurt
Stop

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I had, by thirteen, developed a sort of Taoist hubris about my ability to control via non-control.
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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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One paradox of professional writing is that books written solely for money and/or acclaim will almost never be good enough to garner either.
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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.
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No single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.
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I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it.
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I cannot say what color Lenore Beadsman’s eyes are I cannot look at them they are the sun to me.
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life's endless war against the self you cannot live without.
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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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People, unless they're paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority.
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Mediocrity is contextual.
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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.
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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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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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I'd like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time, instead of having to go back in my head and enjoy them.
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Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.
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My personal belief is that because technology and economic logic has gotten so sophisticated, cruelties can be perpetrated now that would have been unimaginable two or three hundred years ago.
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Probably the most dangerous thing about college education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract arguments inside my head instead of simply paying attention to what's going on right in front of me. TC mark
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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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Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move.
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