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Pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. per se.

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
Ends
Teleological
Western
Value
Becomes
Probably
Pleasure
Values

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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sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them.
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He said she went around with her feelings out in front of her with an arm around the feelings' windpipe and a Glock 9mm. to the feelings' temple like a terrorist with a hostage, daring you to shoot.
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Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.
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I do things like get in a taxi and say, The library, and step on it.
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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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Do this: hate him for me after I die. I beg you. Dying request.
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You can be shaped, or you can be broken. There is not much in between. Try to learn. Be coachable. Try to learn from everybody, especially those who fail. This is hard. ... How promising you are as a Student of the Game is a function of what you can pay attention to without running away.
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My bones are ringing the way sometimes people say their ears are ringing, I'm so tired.
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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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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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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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Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.
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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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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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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?
David Foster Wallace
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It now lately sometimes seemed a black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe.
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Truly decent, innocent people can be taxing to be around.
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Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.
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I'm screaming for help and everybody's acting as if I'm singing Ethel Merman covers.
David Foster Wallace