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I had, by thirteen, developed a sort of Taoist hubris about my ability to control via non-control.

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
Ability
Persons
Taoist
Hubris
Thirteen
Developed
Control
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More quotes by David Foster Wallace

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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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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 is no hatred in my love for you. Only a sadness I feel all the more strongly for my inability to explain or describe it.
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....there is an ending [to Infinite Jest] as far as I'm concerned. Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an end can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame. If no such convergence or projection occured to you, then the book's failed for you.
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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.
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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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I cannot say what color Lenore Beadsman’s eyes are I cannot look at them they are the sun to me.
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This is so American, man: either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it.
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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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Stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.
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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'm very bright, but I'm terrified of sounding like someone who thinks he's very bright-because those people are assholes.
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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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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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Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes.
David Foster Wallace
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Fiction is about what it is to be a human being.
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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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Kafka's evocations are, rather, unconscious and almost sub-archetypal, the little-kid stuff from which myths derive this is why we tend to call even his weirdest stories nightmarish rather than surreal.
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Most of us will still take nihilism over neanderthalism.
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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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