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"Why do prostitutes when they get straight always try and get so prim? It's like long-repressed librarian-ambitions come flooding out."
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"We...advance toward a state of society in which not only each man but every impulse in each man claims carte blanche."
"The action or inaction of any government does not negate the Personal Responsibility of the citizens."
"The journey of every ignorant and obedient society always ends up in the same place: In the desert!"
"The only soap of a dirty society is the clean men, only the clean can wash the grimy!"
"What the new government of Nigeria and other African governments must do, is to start a massive reorientation campaign in the culture of the dignity of labour."
"To Have Thousands Transformed In The Society Is To Lack Unity."
"None of us commences life utterly alone. We each carry within our granular mass the protoplasm residue of past generations' ideas, customs, values, infatuations, prejudices, ethics, and mores. The lees wrought from our seedlings contribute to the social order that oversees a newborn's future. How we conduct ourselves in the here and now emulates our heritage, delineates the parameters of the present culture, and sets the embryonic stage for the emergent ethos of our future and for the generations of people whom we will never meet."
Explore more quotes by David Foster Wallace
"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."
"I mean, Tarantino is such a SHMUCK 90 percent of the time. But ten percent of the time, I've seen genius shining off the guy."
"Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn't enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they're not even very good."
"Literary fiction and poetry are real marginalized right now. There's a fallacy that some of my friends sometimes fall into, the ol' "The audience is stupid. The audience only wants to go this deep. Poor us, we're marginalized because of TV, the great hypnotic blah, blah." You can sit around and have these pity parties for yourself. Of course this is bullshit. If an art form is marginalized it's because it's not speaking to people. One possible reason is that the people it's speaking to have become too stupid to appreciate it. That seems a little easy to me."
"There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact - in its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of social equality for social equality itself - of vastly more help to conservatives and the US status quo than traditional SNOOT prescriptions ever were."
"And we hate this possibility in movies; we hate this "both" shit. "Both" comes off as sloppy characterization, muddy filmmaking, lack of focus. ... But I submit that the real reason we criticized and disliked Lynch's Laura's muddy bothness is that it required of us an empathetic confrontation with the exact same muddy bothness in ourselves and our intimates that makes the real world of moral selves so tense and uncomfortable, a bothness we go to the movies to get a couple hours' fucking relief from."
"There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive."
"I guess a bit part of serious fiction's purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves."
"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."
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