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It takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak.
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
Courage
Personal
Takes
Great
Appear
Weak
More quotes by David Foster Wallace
Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic? I give. You get someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog.
David Foster Wallace
I think the only thing for me, the tricky thing with the footnotes, is that they are an irritant, and they require a little extra work, and so they either have to be really germane or they have to be kind of fun to read.
David Foster Wallace
Worship your body, beauty, and sexual allure and you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.
David Foster Wallace
Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes.
David Foster Wallace
Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn't enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they're not even very good.
David Foster Wallace
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
What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves. They've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.
David Foster Wallace
I don't want to hurt myself. I want to stop hurting.
David Foster Wallace
The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the wall, during the first eight pages.
David Foster Wallace
The way I think about things and experience things is not particularly linear, and it's not orderly, and it's not pyramidical, and there are a lot of loops.
David Foster Wallace
I believe I want adult sanity, which seems to me the only unalloyed form of heroism available today.
David Foster Wallace
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
It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.
David Foster Wallace
There is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness.
David Foster Wallace
I'm not afraid of new things. I'm just afraid of feeling alone even when there's somebody else there. I'm afraid of feeling bad. Maybe that's selfish, but it's the way I feel.
David Foster Wallace
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
Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever.
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
People, unless they're paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority.
David Foster Wallace
It’s a very American illness, the idea of giving yourself away entirely to the idea of working in order to achieve some sort of brass ring that usually involves people feeling some way about you – I mean, people wonder why we walk around feeling alienated and lonely and stressed out.
David Foster Wallace
