Quote

Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have much harder, more tedious or painful lives than I do, overall.

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
Lines
Frustrated
Force
Bored
Checkout
Everyone
Painful
Checkouts
Lives
Consider
Supermarket
Else
Harder
Supermarkets
Persons
Line
Likelihood
Much
Choose
Tedious
People
Probably
Overall

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We will, of course, without hesitation use art to parody, ridicule, debunk, or criticize ideologies.
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Say the whole point of love is to try to get your fingers through the holes in the lover's mask. To get some kind of hold on the mask, and who cares how you do it.
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The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, 'then' what do we do?
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Dieting makes me want to murder everyone around me.
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I was trained mainly as a short story writer and that's how I started writing, but I've also become very interested in non-fiction, just because I got a couple of magazine jobs when I was really poor and needed the money and it turned out that non-fiction was much more interesting than I thought it was.
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So yo then man what's your story?
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Our attachments are our temple, what we worship, no? What we give ourselves to, what we invest with faith. . . . Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care.
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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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The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates.
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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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The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush.
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Real leaders are people who “help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.
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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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I'm screaming for help and everybody's acting as if I'm singing Ethel Merman covers.
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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.
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Most of us will still take nihilism over neanderthalism.
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Rap's conscious response to the poverty and oppression of U.S. blacks is like some hideous parody of sixties black pride.
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You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice.
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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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In fact, the likeliest reason why so many of us care so little about politics is that modern politicians makes us sad, hurt us deep down in ways that are hard even to name, much less talk about.
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