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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.
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
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Ithica
New York
David Wallace
Story
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Stories
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Life
Sharing
Changes
Reader
Outside
More quotes by David Foster Wallace
Fiction, poetry, music...these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.
David Foster Wallace
Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move.
David Foster Wallace
Certain sincerely devout and spiritually advanced people believe that the God of their understanding helps them find parking places and gives them advice on Mass. Lottery numbers.
David Foster Wallace
I'm screaming for help and everybody's acting as if I'm singing Ethel Merman covers.
David Foster Wallace
I'd tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear
David Foster Wallace
She had a brainy girls discomfort about her own beauty and its effects on folks.
David Foster Wallace
There is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness.
David Foster Wallace
Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T true is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it.
David Foster Wallace
Worship power - you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever ore power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart - you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.
David Foster Wallace
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.
David Foster Wallace
Worship your body, beauty, and sexual allure and you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.
David Foster Wallace
There are no choices without personal freedom, Buckeroo. It's not us who are dead inside. These things you find so weak and contemptible in us - these are just the hazards of being free.
David Foster Wallace
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.
David Foster Wallace
The reason ... our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down.
David Foster Wallace
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
One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.
David Foster Wallace
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.
David Foster Wallace
I read,' I say. 'I study and read. I bet I've read everything you've read. Don't think I haven't. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, The library, and step on it.
David Foster Wallace
The point of books is to combat loneliness.
David Foster Wallace
Think of the old cliché about ‘the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.’ This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head.
David Foster Wallace