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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
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
You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
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We will, of course, without hesitation use art to parody, ridicule, debunk, or criticize ideologies.
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I cannot say what color Lenore Beadsman’s eyes are I cannot look at them they are the sun to me.
David Foster Wallace
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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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.
David Foster Wallace
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.
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I am not what you see and hear.
David Foster Wallace
If Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it.
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The severing of an established connection is exponentially more painful than the rejection of an attempted connection.
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Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere Mary went, the lights became erratic.
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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.
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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 is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness.
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No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.
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sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them.
David Foster Wallace
every failure is also a victory.
David Foster Wallace
I believe I want adult sanity, which seems to me the only unalloyed form of heroism available today.
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
Writing fiction takes me out of time. I sit down and the clock will not exist for me for a few hours. That’s probably as close to immortal as we’ll ever get.
David Foster Wallace