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Look, man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?

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
Men
Times
Doe
Dramatize
Look
Agree
Everything
Ones
Nothing
Fiction
Looks
Stupid
Need
Probably
Needs
Dark

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If Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it.
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Does somebody have an explanation why there's human flesh on the hall window upstairs?
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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 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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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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Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever.
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Probably the most dangerous thing about college education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract arguments inside my head instead of simply paying attention to what's going on right in front of me. TC mark
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Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.
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All I'm saying is that it's shortsighted to blame TV. It's simply another symptom. TV didn't invent our aesthetic childishness here any more than the Manhattan Project invented aggression.
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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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I had, by thirteen, developed a sort of Taoist hubris about my ability to control via non-control.
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But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars - compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things.
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Most of us will still take nihilism over neanderthalism.
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Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.
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Good writing isn’t a science. It’s an art, and the horizon is infinite. You can always get better.
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I don't want to hurt myself. I want to stop hurting.
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the psychological need to believe that others take you as seriously as you take yourself. There is nothing particularly wrong with it, as psychological needs go, but yet of course we should always remember that a deep need for anything from other people makes us easy pickings.
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Fiction is about what it is to be a human being.
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I like the fans’ sound at night. Do you? It’s like somebody big far away goes like: it’sOKit’sOKit’sOKit’sOK, over and over. From very far away.
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I do things like get in a taxi and say, The library, and step on it.
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