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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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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
Eye
Textual
Hush
Purposes
Reader
Becomes
Eyes
Purpose

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Do this: hate him for me after I die. I beg you. Dying request.
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I have filled 3 Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me.
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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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I cannot say what color Lenore Beadsman’s eyes are I cannot look at them they are the sun to me.
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The reason ... our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down.
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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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...most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking.
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Some words have to be explicitly uttered, Lenore. Only by actually uttering certain words does one really DO what one SAYS. 'Love' is one of those words, performative words. Some words can literally make things real.
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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.
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If you worship power, you will feel weak and afraid, needing ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay.
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She had a brainy girls discomfort about her own beauty and its effects on folks.
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Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic? I give. You get someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog.
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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.
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There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration.
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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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My worst character flaw that I'm conscious of is that I tend to think my way into circles instead of resolving anything. It's paralyzing and boring for people around me.
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Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have much harder, more tedious or painful lives than I do, overall.
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There's a weird kind of paradox that the more expensive the vacation is, the more potentially anxiety-producing it is.
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I believe I want adult sanity, which seems to me the only unalloyed form of heroism available today.
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American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.
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