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"I think the world divides neatly into those who are excited by the managed induction of terror and those who are not. I do not find terror exciting. I find it terrifying. One of my basic goals is to subject my nervous system to as little total terror as possible. The cruel paradox of course is that this kind of makeup usually goes hand in hand with a delicate nervous system that's extremely easy to terrify."
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"Until you break through the walls of fear, you will not be able to reach the door of opportunity."
"There are things so horrible that even the dark is afraid of them. Most people don't know this and this is just as well because the world could not really operate if everyone stayed in bed with the blankets over their head, which is what would happen if people knew what horrors lay a shadow's width away."
"It's not the circumstances that we should feel threatened by, it's the fear of the circumstances that poses the real threat."
Explore more quotes by David Foster Wallace
"It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art."
"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."
"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."
"I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader."
"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."
"But someone sometime let you forget how to choose, and what. Someone let your peoples forget it was the only thing of importance, choosing. . . How to choose any but a child's greedy choices if there is no loving-filled father to guide, inform, teach the person how to choose? How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?"
"What teachers and the administration in that era never seemed to see was that the mental work of what they called daydreaming often required more effort and concentration than it would have taken simply to listen in class. Laziness is not the issue. It is just not the work dictated by the administration."
"There is something magical to me about literature and fiction and I think it can do things not only that pop culture cannot do but that are urgent now: one is that by creating a character in a work of fiction you can allow a reader to leap over the wall of self and to allow him to imagine himself not only somewhere else but someone else in a way that television and movies, in a way that no other form can do. I think people are essentially lonely and alone and frightened of being alone."
"The real, many-veiled answer to the question of just what goes through a great player's mind as he stands at the center of hostile crowd-noise and lines up the free-throw that will decide the game might well be: nothing at all."
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