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You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

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
Inspirational
Doesn
Graduation
Consciously
Decide
Worship
Meaning

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Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.
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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?
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I'd tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear
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I have filled 3 Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me.
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American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.
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Almost anything that you pay close, direct attention to becomes interesting.
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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.
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Does somebody have an explanation why there's human flesh on the hall window upstairs?
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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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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.
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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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What teachers and the administration in that era never seemed to see was that the mental work of what they called daydreaming often required more effort and concentration than it would have taken simply to listen in class. Laziness is not the issue. It is just not the work dictated by the administration.
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TV's real agenda is to be liked, because if you like what you're seeing, you'll stay tuned. TV is completely unabashed about this it's its sole raison.
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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.
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I want to tell you,' the voice on the phone said. 'My head is filled with things to say.' ... 'I don't mind,' Hal said softly. 'I could wait forever.' 'That's what you think,' the voice said. The connection was cut.
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The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush.
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The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.
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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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My bones are ringing the way sometimes people say their ears are ringing, I'm so tired.
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What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.
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