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There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration.

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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University Teacher
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Ithica
New York
David Wallace
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Commencement
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Adults
Petty
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Routine

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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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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.
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I'd like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time, instead of having to go back in my head and enjoy them.
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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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What TV is extremely good at - and realize that this is 'all it does' - is discerning what large numbers of people think they want, and supplying it.
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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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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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One paradox of professional writing is that books written solely for money and/or acclaim will almost never be good enough to garner either.
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We are not dead but asleep, dreaming of ourselves.
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Good writing isn’t a science. It’s an art, and the horizon is infinite. You can always get better.
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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 had, by thirteen, developed a sort of Taoist hubris about my ability to control via non-control.
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It's like a fugue of evaded responsibility.
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If you worship power, you will feel weak and afraid, needing ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay.
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