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Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude - but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense.

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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New York
David Wallace
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Platitudes
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More quotes by David Foster Wallace

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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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We are not dead but asleep, dreaming of ourselves.
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What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves. They've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.
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...the sun would leave my sky if I couldn't assume you'd simply come and tell me you were sad.
David Foster Wallace
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Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move.
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It's probably hard to feel any sort of Romantic spiritual connection to nature when you have to make your living from it.
David Foster Wallace
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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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Progressive liberals seem incapable of stating the obvious truth: that we who are well off should be willing to share more of what we have with poor people not for the poor people's sake but for our own i.e., we should share what we have in order to become less narrow and frightened and lonely and self-centered people.
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Does somebody have an explanation why there's human flesh on the hall window upstairs?
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Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever.
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Many people in America throw the term fascism around, particularly for Middle-Eastern terrorists, but in fact what fascism really is is a close alliance between a unitary executive and a state and large corporations and a state.
David Foster Wallace
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If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important - if you want to operate on your default-setting - then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying.
David Foster Wallace
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It’s a very American illness, the idea of giving yourself away entirely to the idea of working in order to achieve some sort of brass ring that usually involves people feeling some way about you – I mean, people wonder why we walk around feeling alienated and lonely and stressed out.
David Foster Wallace
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...most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking.
David Foster Wallace
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To experience commitment as the loss of options, a type of death, the death of childhood's limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress-this will happen, mark me. Childhood's end.
David Foster Wallace
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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.
David Foster Wallace
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Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.
David Foster Wallace
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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?
David Foster Wallace
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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?
David Foster Wallace
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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.
David Foster Wallace