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View Full Version : David Foster Wallace, (his quotes).



nefertiti
07-22-2010, 11:14 AM
David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 200&) was an American author of novels, essays, and short stories, and a professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California. He was widely known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, which Time included in its All-Time 100 Greatest Novels list (covering the period 1923–2006).

Los Angeles Times book editor David Ulin called Wallace "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last 20 years."

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"And I'm not saying that television is vulgar and dumb because the people who compose the Audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests".

"Pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. per se".

"Rock was and is all about busting loose, exceeding limits, and limits are usually set by parents, ancestors, older authorities."

"The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness."

"If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible psychological reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting. 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".

"Acceptance is usally more a matter of fatigue than anything else."

"...morning is the soul's night."

"The sun like a sneaky keyhole view of hell."

"I never, even for a moment, doubted what they’d told me. This is why it is that adults and even parents can, unwittingly, be cruel: they cannot imagine doubt’s complete absence. They have forgotten"

"What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They've got their own vision, they're own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings."

"If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more 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. And so on."

"Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere Mary went, the lights became erratic."