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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
Persons
Taoist
Hubris
Thirteen
Developed
Control
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Ability

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In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.
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To be a mass tourist, for me,...is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.
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We're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we've never even met?
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...morning is the soul's night.
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Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.
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The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.
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Dostoevski informs everybody or he ought to.
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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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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.
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I have always tried to avoid talking to pretty girls, because pretty girls have a vicious effect on me in which every part of my brain is shut down except for the part that says unbelievably stupid things and the part that is aware that I am saying unbelievably stupid things.
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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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Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself.
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We are not dead but asleep, dreaming of ourselves.
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We're not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader's own life outside the story changes the story.
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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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Almost anything that you pay close, direct attention to becomes interesting.
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Mediocrity is contextual.
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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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The sound of wind had become, for me, silence. When it went away, I was left with the squeak of the blood in my head and the aural glitter of all those little eardrum hairs quivering like a drunk in withdrawal.
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Probably the most dangerous thing about college education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract arguments inside my head instead of simply paying attention to what's going on right in front of me. TC mark
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