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...most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking.

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
Addicted
Unhealthy
Substance
Meaning
Relationship
Also
Thinking
People
Compulsive

More quotes by David Foster Wallace

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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
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Stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.
David Foster Wallace
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Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever.
David Foster Wallace
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She had a brainy girls discomfort about her own beauty and its effects on folks.
David Foster Wallace
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Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.
David Foster Wallace
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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.
David Foster Wallace
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Kafka's evocations are, rather, unconscious and almost sub-archetypal, the little-kid stuff from which myths derive this is why we tend to call even his weirdest stories nightmarish rather than surreal.
David Foster Wallace
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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.
David Foster Wallace
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I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I'm not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I.
David Foster Wallace
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There is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness.
David Foster Wallace
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The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, 'then' what do we do?
David Foster Wallace
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Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut off David Lynch is interested in the ear.
David Foster Wallace
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The point here is ... to be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.
David Foster Wallace
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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
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Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T true is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it.
David Foster Wallace
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Fiction is about what it is to be a human being.
David Foster Wallace
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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
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...morning is the soul's night.
David Foster Wallace
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There are no choices without personal freedom, Buckeroo. It's not us who are dead inside. These things you find so weak and contemptible in us - these are just the hazards of being free.
David Foster Wallace
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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.
David Foster Wallace