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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.
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
Unsatisfying
Pervasive
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Irony
Cultural
Impossible
Powerful
Reason
More quotes by David Foster Wallace
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.
David Foster Wallace
What TV is extremely good at - and realize that this is 'all it does' - is discerning what large numbers of people think they want, and supplying it.
David Foster Wallace
We will, of course, without hesitation use art to parody, ridicule, debunk, or criticize ideologies.
David Foster Wallace
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
Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he's devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It's hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.
David Foster Wallace
One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.
David Foster Wallace
Worship power - you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever ore power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart - you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.
David Foster Wallace
The man who knows his limitations, has none.
David Foster Wallace
There's a weird kind of paradox that the more expensive the vacation is, the more potentially anxiety-producing it is.
David Foster Wallace
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
Rap's conscious response to the poverty and oppression of U.S. blacks is like some hideous parody of sixties black pride.
David Foster Wallace
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
...the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.
David Foster Wallace
Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.
David Foster Wallace
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
The sound of wind had become, for me, silence. When it went away, I was left with the squeak of the blood in my head and the aural glitter of all those little eardrum hairs quivering like a drunk in withdrawal.
David Foster Wallace
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
It's like a fugue of evaded responsibility.
David Foster Wallace
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.
David Foster Wallace
It takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak.
David Foster Wallace
