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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.
David Foster Wallace
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David Foster Wallace
Age: 45 †
Born: 1962
Born: February 21
Died: 2008
Died: February 12
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Ithica
New York
David Wallace
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More quotes by David Foster Wallace
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I do things like get in a taxi and say, The library, and step on it.
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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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There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says 'Morning, boys. How's the water?' And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes 'What the hell is water?'
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There's a weird kind of paradox that the more expensive the vacation is, the more potentially anxiety-producing it is.
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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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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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My bones are ringing the way sometimes people say their ears are ringing, I'm so tired.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes.
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The point of books is to combat loneliness.
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Dostoevski informs everybody or he ought to.
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The reason ... our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down.
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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?
David Foster Wallace
