David Foster Wallace Quotes
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These worst mornings with cold floors and hot windows and merciless light-the soul’s certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer.
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The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush.
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'Tax Law is like the world's biggest chess game with all sorts of weird conundrums about ethics and civics and consent of the governed built in. For me, it's a bit like math. I have no talent for it but find it still erotically interesting.'
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That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
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The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.
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They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier.
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That everyone is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else. That this isn't necessarily perverse.
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It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most 'familiarity' is meditated and delusive.
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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.
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I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art.
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Then Thursday Coyle had his left wrist tied to his right ankle and was still beating this new kid Stockhausen until Schtitt sent Tex Watson down to tell him to knock it off.
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Rap's conscious response to the poverty and oppression of U.S. blacks is like some hideous parody of sixties black pride.
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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.
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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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I just think that fiction that isn't exploring what it means to be human today isn't art.
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Pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. per se.
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For these cultures, getting rid of the pain without addressing the deeper cause would be like shutting off a fire alarm while the fire's still going.
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We're kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we're uneasy about the fact that we wish they'd come back - I mean, what's wrong with us?
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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.
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Betraying her class and origin with the heartbreaking openness Joelle's always viewed as either terribly stupid or terribly brave
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This is so American, man: either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it.
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There are no choices without personal freedom, Buckeroo. It's not us who are dead inside. These things you find so weak and contemptible in us - these are just the hazards of being free
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After a few weeks of this she'd spend a whole day weeping, beating at herself as if on fire.
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The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates.