Communication Quote by David Foster Wallace

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

David Foster Wallace

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“I felt more solidly composed, now that I was horizontal. I was impossible to knock down.”

David Foster Wallace

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“We all have our little solipsistic delusions, ghastly intuitions of utter singularity: that we are the only one in the house who ever fills the ice-cube tray, who unloads the clean dishwasher, who occasionally pees in the shower, whose eyelid twitches on first dates; that only we take casualness terribly seriously; that only we fashion supplication into courtesy; that only…

David Foster Wallace

“It's no accident that in a bureaucracy getting fired is called 'termination,' as in ontological erasure.”

David Foster Wallace

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Footnote: 79) The anchor is gigantic and must weigh a hundred tons, and -- delightfully -- it really is anchor-shaped, i.e. the same shape…

David Foster Wallace

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“The paradoxical intercourse of audience and celebrity. The suppressed awareness that the whole reason ordinary people found celebrity fascinating was that they were not,…

David Foster Wallace

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“I am coming to see that the sensation of the worst nightmares, a sensation that can be felt asleep or awake, is identical to those worst dreams' form itself: the sudden intra-dream realization that the nightmares' very essence and center has been with you all along, even awake: it's just been ... overlooked ; and then that horrific interval between…

David Foster Wallace

“He cranks the condo’s AC way down at night and still most mornings wakes up soaked, fetally curled, entombed in that kind of psychic…

David Foster Wallace

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“To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it's because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that's where phrases like 'deadly dull' or 'excruciatingly dull' come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic…

David Foster Wallace

“If you’re subjected to enough great salesmen and salespitches and marketing concepts for long enough—like from your earliest Saturday-morning cartoons, let’s say—it is only a matter of time before you start believing deep down that everything is sales and marketing, and that whenever somebody seems like they care about you or about some noble idea or cause, that person is…

David Foster Wallace

“Why is the truth usually not just un- but anti-interesting?”

David Foster Wallace

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“She almost reminds the engineer of certain types in high school whom everyone adored because you sensed it made no difference to them whether…

David Foster Wallace

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To be, in a word, unborable… It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you…

David Foster Wallace

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Some people still believe you should just fall in line with what's going on - and that's scary. It makes a mockery of freedom…

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The problem posed by indirect speech acts is the problem of how it is possible for the speaker to say one thing and mean…

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We should have a conversation when we hang up.

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Sing like no one's listening, love like you've never been hurt, dance like nobody's watching, and live like its heaven on earth.

Mark Twain

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A poet is wounded into speech, and he examines these wounds, meticulously, to discover how to heal them. The bad poet harangues at the…

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“To engage in dialogue is to serve others via whatever is real inside you; to engage in debate is to ultimately serve the illusions…

Oli Anderson

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What it comes down to for me is this: Will the technologies of communication in our culture, serve to enlighten us and help us…

Roger Waters

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In dialogue, there is opposition, yes, but no head-on collision. Smashing heads does not open minds.

Deborah Tannen

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A dialogue is very important. It is a form of communication in which question and answer continue till a question is left without an answer. Thus the question is suspended between the two persons involved in this answer and question. It is like a bud with untouched blossoms . . . If the question is left totally untouched by thought,…

Jiddu Krishnamurti

I get afraid of the dark if I'm in a great deal of dark, and I have to move around inside of that fear...…

Emil Ferris

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I've been in a serious conversation with one of my children, and a fan has come up. I've been in a public bathroom and…

Helen Reddy

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Life as we know it is fundamentally unsatisfying. I think most folks feel this to be true. They know that a life of aimless consumption isn't much of a life. And work offers us very little satisfaction. Plus our work and consumption is destroying the environment. And this is in the rich countries. Add starvation, etc. to the mix, and…

Michael Yates

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Communication Quote by David Foster Wallace

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