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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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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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You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
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I felt, as I became a later and later bloomer, alienated not just from my own recalcitrant glabrous little body but in a way from the whole elemental exterior I'd come to see as my co-conspirator.
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The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.
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The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.
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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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Te Occidere Possunt Sed Te Edere Non Possunt Nefas Est (They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier).
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I am not what you see and hear.
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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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Footnote: 79) The anchor is gigantic and must weigh a hundred tons, and -- delightfully -- it really is anchor-shaped, i.e. the same shape as anchors in tattoos.
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Dostoevski informs everybody or he ought to.
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I believe I want adult sanity, which seems to me the only unalloyed form of heroism available today.
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Do this: hate him for me after I die. I beg you. Dying request.
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I do things like get in a taxi and say, The library, and step on it.
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If Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it.
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Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.
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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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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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It feels intensely twisted to see reigning industry queen Jenna Jameson chilling out at the Vivid booth in Jordaches and a latex bustier and to know already that she has a tattoo of a sundered valentine with the tagline Heart Breaker on her right buttock and a tiny hairless ole just left of her anus.
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Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.
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