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This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn't engage anybody.

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
Lines
Doesn
Two
Done
Diagnosis
Engagement
Engage
Anybody

More quotes by David Foster Wallace

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The severing of an established connection is exponentially more painful than the rejection of an attempted connection.
David Foster Wallace
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I felt, as I became a later and later bloomer, alienated not just from my own recalcitrant glabrous little body but in a way from the whole elemental exterior I'd come to see as my co-conspirator.
David Foster Wallace
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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.
David Foster Wallace
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It's like a fugue of evaded responsibility.
David Foster Wallace
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...morning is the soul's night.
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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So yo then man what's your story?
David Foster Wallace
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What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love? What if the temple comes to Mohammed? What if you just love? without deciding? You just do: you see her and in that instant are lost to sober account-keeping and cannot choose but to love?
David Foster Wallace
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I'm screaming for help and everybody's acting as if I'm singing Ethel Merman covers.
David Foster Wallace
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The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush.
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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Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself.
David Foster Wallace
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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.
David Foster Wallace
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Truly decent, innocent people can be taxing to be around.
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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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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I don't think writers are any smarter than other people. I think they may be more compelling in their stupidity, or in their confusion.
David Foster Wallace
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What teachers and the administration in that era never seemed to see was that the mental work of what they called daydreaming often required more effort and concentration than it would have taken simply to listen in class. Laziness is not the issue. It is just not the work dictated by the administration.
David Foster Wallace
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life's endless war against the self you cannot live without.
David Foster Wallace
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Hear this or not, as you will. Learn it now, or later -- the world has time. Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui -- these are the true hero's enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real.
David Foster Wallace