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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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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
Possibility
Automatically
Sure
Operate
Reality
Annoying
Persons
Settings
Important
Possibilities
Really
Setting
Like
Consider
Default
Aren
Pointless

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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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I find in myself a need to get very away.
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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.
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Does somebody have an explanation why there's human flesh on the hall window upstairs?
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every failure is also a victory.
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Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.
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It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art.
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I miss everyone. I can remember being young and feeling a thing and identifying it as homesickness, and then thinking well now that’s odd, isn’t it, because I was home, all the time. What on earth are we to make of that?
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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'm not afraid of new things. I'm just afraid of feeling alone even when there's somebody else there. I'm afraid of feeling bad. Maybe that's selfish, but it's the way I feel.
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That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we're all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine.
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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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I will probably write an hour a day and spend eight hours a day biting my knuckle and worrying about not writing.
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If some people read my fiction and see it as fundamentally about philosophical ideas, what it probably means is that these are pieces where the characters are not as alive and interesting as I meant them to be.
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TV's real agenda is to be liked, because if you like what you're seeing, you'll stay tuned. TV is completely unabashed about this it's its sole raison.
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life's endless war against the self you cannot live without.
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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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The fun of reading as an exchange between consciousnesses, a way for human beings to talk to each other about stuff we can't normally talk about.
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She had a brainy girls discomfort about her own beauty and its effects on folks.
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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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