-when he thinks of the starry-eyed puerility and narcissism of these fantasies now, a rough decade later, Schmidt experiences a kind of full-framed internal wince, that type of embarrassment-before-self that makes our most mortifying memories objects of fascination and repulsion at once, though in Terry Schmidt's case a certain amount of introspection and psychotherapy had enabled him to understand that his professional fantasies were not in the main all that unique, that a large percentage I bright young men and women locate the impetus behind their career choice in the belief that they are fundamentally different from the common run of man, unique and in certain crucial ways superior, more as it were central, meaningful--what else could explain the fact that they can and will make a difference in their chosen field simply by the fact that thy themselves have been at the exact center of all they've experienced for the whole 20 years of their conscious lives?

David Foster Wallace

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the American nation today is infantile so much as adolescent—that is ambivalent in its twin desire for both authoritarian structure and the end of parental hegemony

David Foster Wallace

Mots clés american-dream

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I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

David Foster Wallace

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You have wondered perhaps, why all real accountants wear hats? They are today’s cowboys

David Foster Wallace

Mots clés humor

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It may be that psychologists are off-base in their preoccupation with children’s need to feel that their father or some other parent loves them. It also seems valid to consider the child’s desire to feel that a parent actually likes them, as love itself is so automatic and preprogrammed in a parent that it isn’t a very good test of whatever it is that the typical child feels so anxious to pass the test of

David Foster Wallace

Mots clés family-relationships

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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

David Foster Wallace

Mots clés childhood

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Boo, I think I no longer believe in monsters as faces in the floor or feral infants or vampires or whatever. I think at seventeen now I believe the only real monsters might be the type of liar where there's simply no way to tell. The ones who give nothing away.

David Foster Wallace

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When a solipsist dies ... everything goes with him.

David Foster Wallace

Mots clés death solipsism john-updike

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I am fortunately an entirely handsome devil and appear even younger than twenty-nine. I look like a clean cut youth, a boy next door, and a good egg, and my mother stated at one time that I have the face of a heaven's angel. I have the eyes of an attractive marsupial, and I have baby-soft and white skin, and a fair complexion. I do not even have to shave, and I have finely styled hair without any of dandruff's unsightly itching or flaking. I keep my hair perfectly groomed, neat, and short at all times. I have exceptionally attractive ears.

David Foster Wallace

Mots clés dfw david-foster-wallace girl-with-curious-hair

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Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies.

David Foster Wallace

Mots clés world human-nature crisis television responsibility

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