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Fiction is about what it is to be a human being.

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
Humans
Fiction
Human

More quotes by David Foster Wallace

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The way I think about things and experience things is not particularly linear, and it's not orderly, and it's not pyramidical, and there are a lot of loops.
David Foster Wallace
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The point here is ... to be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.
David Foster Wallace
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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.
David Foster Wallace
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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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It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.
David Foster Wallace
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This is so American, man: either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it.
David Foster Wallace
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You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
David Foster Wallace
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In fact, the likeliest reason why so many of us care so little about politics is that modern politicians makes us sad, hurt us deep down in ways that are hard even to name, much less talk about.
David Foster Wallace
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The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.
David Foster Wallace
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I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I'm not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I.
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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sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them.
David Foster Wallace
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I find in myself a need to get very away.
David Foster Wallace
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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.
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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...Genuine pathological openness is about as seductive as Tourette's Syndrome.
David Foster Wallace
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I believe I want adult sanity, which seems to me the only unalloyed form of heroism available today.
David Foster Wallace
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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.
David Foster Wallace
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...the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.
David Foster Wallace
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There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says 'Morning, boys. How's the water?' And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes 'What the hell is water?'
David Foster Wallace