"I find in myself a need to get very away."
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Quote collection
David Foster Wallace quotes (page 14 of 18)
345 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Keep in mind that a language is both a map of the world and its own world, with its own shadowlands and crevasses - places where statements that seem to obey all the language's rules are nevertheless impossible to deal with."
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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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"I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it."
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"Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved."
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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."
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"I felt the sort of soaring, ceilingless tedium that transcends tedium and becomes worry."
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"That what appears to be egoism so often isn't."
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"sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them."
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"I have always tried to avoid talking to pretty girls, because pretty girls have a vicious effect on me in which every part of my brain is shut down except for the part that says unbelievably stupid things and the part that is aware that I am saying unbelievably stupid things."
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"Dieting makes me want to murder everyone around me."
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"That it is statistically easier for low-IQ people to kick an addiction than it is for high-IQ people...That boring activities become, perversely, much less boring if you concentrate intently on them."
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"She wanted only tall smooth bottles whose labels spoke of Proof."
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"The assumption that you everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism."
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"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."
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"The truth is that the heroism of your childhood entertainments was not true valor. It was theatre. The grand gesture, the moment of choice, the mortal danger, the external foe, the climactic battle whose outcome resolves all--all designed to appear heroic, to excite and gratify and audience. Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality--there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand?Here is the truth--actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested."
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"If Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it."
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"I read,' I say. 'I study and read. I bet I've read everything you've read. Don't think I haven't. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it."
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"Like so many other nerdy, disaffected young people of that time, I dreamed of becoming an 'artist', i.e., somebody whose adult job was original and creative instead of tedious and dronelike."
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"My chest bumps like a dryer with shoes in it."
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