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I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it.

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
Maybe
Jobs
Sense
Today
Important
Discrete
Make
Received
Information
Bits

More quotes by David Foster Wallace

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In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.
David Foster Wallace
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Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.
David Foster Wallace
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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
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She wanted only tall smooth bottles whose labels spoke of Proof.
David Foster Wallace
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The point of books is to combat loneliness.
David Foster Wallace
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What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves. They've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.
David Foster Wallace
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I'd like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time, instead of having to go back in my head and enjoy them.
David Foster Wallace
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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.
David Foster Wallace
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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
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Dostoevski informs everybody or he ought to.
David Foster Wallace
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Fiction, poetry, music...these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.
David Foster Wallace
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I had, by thirteen, developed a sort of Taoist hubris about my ability to control via non-control.
David Foster Wallace
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The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, 'then' what do we do?
David Foster Wallace
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TV's real agenda is to be liked, because if you like what you're seeing, you'll stay tuned. TV is completely unabashed about this it's its sole raison.
David Foster Wallace
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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
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We're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we've never even met?
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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The integrity of my sleep has been forever compromised, sir.
David Foster Wallace
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Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever.
David Foster Wallace
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....there is an ending [to Infinite Jest] as far as I'm concerned. Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an end can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame. If no such convergence or projection occured to you, then the book's failed for you.
David Foster Wallace