"And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The……" — David Foster Wallace
"And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit "I don’t really mean what I’m saying." So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: "How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean."
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David Foster Wallace
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303 Quotes by David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace has 303 quotes on this site.
A few more worth reading:
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We will, of course, without hesitation use art to parody, ridicule, debunk, or criticize ideologies.
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One paradox of professional writing is that books written solely for money and/or acclaim will almost never be good enough…
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God, what a ghastly enterprise to be in, though-and what an odd way to achieve success. I'm an exhibitionist who…
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When I say or write something, there are actually a whole lot of different things I am communicating. The propositional…
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Under fun's new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you…
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Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn't enough to make him great. If it were,…
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Some words have to be explicitly uttered, Lenore. Only by actually uttering certain words does one really DO what one…
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You have a great deal of yourself on the line, writing- your vanity is at stake. You discover a tricky…
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Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare…
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No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories.
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Molly Notkin often confides on the phone to Joelle van Dyne about the one tormented love of Nokin's life thus…
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No single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.
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More All Quotes
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Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally…
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No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our…
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The ultimate end of human acts is eudaimonia, happiness in the sense of living well, which all men desire; all…
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The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes…
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Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of…
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We have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and…
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I keep my friends as misers do their treasure, because, of all the things granted us by wisdom, none is…
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We must all make peace so that we can all live in peace.
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The spirit of Ubuntu, that once led Haiti to emerge as the first independent black nation in 1804, helped Venezuela,…
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As we all know, many people remain buried under tons of rubble and debris, waiting to be rescued. When we…
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Wise people, even though all laws were abolished, would still lead the same life.
— Aristophanes
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A friend to all is a friend to none.
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