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"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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"Nothing worthwhile ever came from divided attention."

"Stay focused, leave everything and do something."

"The real direction of your vision is as important as your vision. Notwithstanding how large the goal post might be, the power behind your shots least matter as its direction, for it is more of the direction that will determine the goals you shall score and the final score in the end."

"Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."

"Focus is saying no to 1,000 good ideas."

"Part of Washington keeping its promises is a focus on directing more dollars into our local classrooms."

"The black world was expanding before me, and I could see now that that world was more than a photonegative of that of the people who believe they are white. 'White America' is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining). But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, 'white people' would cease to exist for want of reasons."

"The 21st Century has begun as an era of uncertainty, with a heightened focus on security and public safety."
Explore more quotes by David Foster Wallace

"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."

"Why do prostitutes when they get straight always try and get so prim? It's like long-repressed librarian-ambitions come flooding out."

"I think I was very often bored as a child, but boredom is not what I knew it as-what I knew was that I worried a lot."

"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."

"It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed ... If a person in physical pain has a hard time attending to anything except that pain, a clinically depressed person cannot even perceive any other person or thing as independent of the universal pain that is digesting her cell by cell."

"You decide. You be the judge. It says You are welcome regardless of severity. Severity is in the eye of the sufferer, it says. Pain is pain."

"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."

"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."
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