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David Foster Wallace

54 quotesEssayist · Born Feb 21, 1962 · Died Sep 12, 2008 · United States Of America · Male

David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008) was an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist, as well as an instructor of English and creative writing. Wallace's 1996 novel Infinite Jest was cited by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. Wallace's last, unfinished novel, The Pale King, was published in 2011 and was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. A biography of Wallace was published in September 2012, and an extensive critical literature on his work has developed in the past decade. Los Angeles Times book editor David Ulin has called Wallace "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last 20 years". 2Work 3Career Wallace's first novel, The Broom of the System (1987), garnered national attention and critical praise. Caryn James of the New York Times called it a successful "manic, human, flawed extravaganza", "emerging straight from the excessive tradition of Stanley Elkin's Franchiser, Thomas Pynchon's V., John Irving's World According to Garp". In 1991 he began teaching literature as an adjunct professor at Emerson College in Boston. The next year, at the suggestion of colleague and supporter Steven Moore, Wallace obtained a position in the English department at Illinois State University. He had begun work on his second novel, Infinite Jest, in 1991, and submitted a draft to his editor in December 199

All Life (4)Letting Go (3)first lines of books (3)Loneliness (3)Identity (3)Love (3)strange (2)emotions (2)Lonely (2)107 Of The Greatest Single Sentences In Literature (2)Soul Mate (2)The Person You'll Become (2)Relationships (2)Perfect Sentences (2)Philosophy (2)

From “Infinite Jest”

The quiet has a kind of menace. The whole cubular building seems to Hal to hold the tensed menace of a living thing that’s chosen to hold itself still.

Quiet Menace of Silence

American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.

America American Experience

Talent is sort of a dark gift, that talent is its own expectation: it is there from the start and either lived up to or lost.

Talent Potential

Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care. What you wish to sing of as tragic love is an attachment not carefully chosen. Die for one person? This is a craziness. Persons change, leave, die, become ill. They leave, lie,…

Attachments Bigger Than Your Self Fanaticism

You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place. It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again.

This Is Human Life Limits Tragedy

From “Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays”

There are limits to what even interested persons can ask of each other.

Relationships separation Limitations Love one perfect sentence

Like all good ad clichés, it manages to suggest everything and mean nothing.

Advertising Cliches

To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.

Fandom Icons Famous Fame Famous People

The horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.

The Journey Is The Destination Forever Fighting Life Struggle It Never Ends

Progressive liberals seem incapable of stating the obvious truth: that we who are well off should be willing to share more of what we have with poor people not for the poor people’s sake but for our own; i.e., we should share what we have in order to become less narrow and frightened and lonely and…

Politics Self-Intrest Morality Ethics

Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I’m bullshitting myself, morally speaking?

Who Am I Identity Deep

There are limits to what even interested persons can ask of each other.

Limits Conversation How Deep Can We Talk?

Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?

Lobsters Killing Things Boiling Lobsters

Every time someone I know decides to terminate a pregnancy, I am required to believe simultaneously that she is doing the wrong thing and that she has every right to do it.

Pro-Life Pro-Choice Abortion

From “This Is Water”

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort…

Philosophy The Person You'll Become

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, 'Morning, boys. How's the water?' And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, 'What the hell is…

Philosophy Psychology The Person You'll Become

From “The Pale King”

Every love story is a ghost story.

Love Love Stories Nostalgia Memories Heartbreak

From “Consider the Lobster and Other Essays”

THE AMERICAN ACADEMY of Emergency Medicine confirms it: Each year, between one and two dozen adult US males are admitted to ERs after having castrated themselves.

first lines of books humor fact

From “The Broom of the System: A Novel (Penguin Ink) (The Penguin Ink Series)”

Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.

first lines of books

From “Infinite Jest: A Novel”

I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies.

first lines of books Offices Bodies

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