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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.

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
Almost
Garner
Money
Acclaim
Book
Solely
Enough
Paradox
Writing
Professional
Good
Either
Never
Books
Written

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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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Worship your body, beauty, and sexual allure and you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.
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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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She had a brainy girls discomfort about her own beauty and its effects on folks.
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I miss everyone. I can remember being young and feeling a thing and identifying it as homesickness, and then thinking well now that’s odd, isn’t it, because I was home, all the time. What on earth are we to make of that?
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Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.
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Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever.
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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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I'm screaming for help and everybody's acting as if I'm singing Ethel Merman covers.
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Stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.
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Lucky people develop a relationship with a certain kind of art that becomes spiritual, almost religious, and doesn’t mean, you know, church stuff, but it means you’re just never the same.
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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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Dieting makes me want to murder everyone around me.
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He said she went around with her feelings out in front of her with an arm around the feelings' windpipe and a Glock 9mm. to the feelings' temple like a terrorist with a hostage, daring you to shoot.
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Here is how to handle being a feral prodigy.
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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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Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut off David Lynch is interested in the ear.
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Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.
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Say the whole point of love is to try to get your fingers through the holes in the lover's mask. To get some kind of hold on the mask, and who cares how you do it.
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