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Altruism is innate, but it's not instinctual. Everybody's wired for it, but a switch has to be flipped.

David Rakoff

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David Rakoff
Age: 47 †
Born: 1964
Born: November 27
Died: 2012
Died: August 9
Comedian
Essayist
Journalist
Radio Personality
Writer
Montreal
Quebec
David Benjamin Rakoff
Wired
Flipped
Altruism
Switch
Innate
Everybody
Instinctual

More quotes by David Rakoff

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Being a stranger was like being dead, and brought to mind how, in a book he had read that most folks misunderstood one common state: The flip side of love is indifference, not hate.
David Rakoff
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Just think, the shoes I wouldn’t be caught dead in might actually turn out to be the shoes I am caught dead in.
David Rakoff
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Youth is not wasted on the young, it is perpetrated on the young.
David Rakoff
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People are really trying their best. Just like being happy and sad, you will find yourself on both sides of the equation many times over your lifetime, either saying or hearing the wrong thing. Let's all give each other a pass, shall we?
David Rakoff
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I find life itself provides ample and sufficient tests of my valor and mettle: illness betrayal fruitless searches for love working for the abusive, the insane, and the despotic. All challenges easily as thrilling to me as scrambling over icy rock in a pair of barely adequate boots.
David Rakoff
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Central to living a life that is good, is a life that's forgiving.
David Rakoff
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Simplicity, it seems, has always been wasted on those who simply cannot appreciate it
David Rakoff
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There's nothing particularly wrong with being more pessimistic than optimistic. Optimism is broad-based, non-detail-oriented thinking pessimism is detail-oriented thinking.
David Rakoff
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Everybody's got something. In the end, what choice does one really have but to understand that truth, to really take it in, and then shop for groceries, get a haircut, do one's work get on with the business of one's life. That's the hope, anyway.
David Rakoff
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There is supercomputer somewhere in the Nevada desert whose sole function is to count the number of times that I have said the following, because it is unquantifiable by human minds at this point, but this time it’s really true: I should have stayed home.
David Rakoff
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But if one's dreams having to come true was the only referendum on whether they were beautiful, or worth dreaming, well then, no one would wish for anything. And that would be so much sadder.
David Rakoff
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If psychoanalysis was late 19th century secular Judaism’s way of finding spiritual meaning in a post-religious world, and retail is the late 20th century’s way of finding spiritual meaning in a post-religious world, what does it mean that I’m impersonating the father of psychoanalysis in a store window to commemorate a religious holiday?
David Rakoff
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Well into adulthood, writing has never gotten easier. It still only ever begins badly, and there are no guarantees that this is not the day when the jig is finally up.
David Rakoff
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There is nothing so cleansing or reassuring as a vicarious sadness.
David Rakoff
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Almost any age is better than twenty-two.
David Rakoff
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Not being funny doesn't make you a bad person. Not having a sense of humor does.
David Rakoff
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One of the marks of a life well lived has to be reaching a state of finally getting it, of not needing more, and of being able to sign off with something approaching peace of mind.
David Rakoff
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I am no fun at all. In fact, I am anti-fun. Not as in anti-violence, but as in anti-matter. I am not so much against fun - although I suppose I kind of am - as I am the opposite of fun. I suck the fun out of a room. Or perhaps I'm just a different kind of fun the kind that leaves on bereft of hope the kind of fun that ends in tears.
David Rakoff
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In the window, I fantasize... about providing grown-ups and children alike with the greatest gift of all: insight.
David Rakoff