The bilateral illusion of unilateral attention was almost infantilely gratifying from an emotional standpoint: you got to believe you were receiving somebody's complete attention without having to return it. Regarded with the objectivity of hindsight, the illusion appears arational, almost literally fantastic: it would be like being able to both lie and to trust other people at the same time.
("Infinite Jest")
More Quotes from David Foster Wallace:
The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates.David Foster Wallace
American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.
David Foster Wallace
Why not? Why not?Why not not, then, if the best reasoning you can contrive is why not?
David Foster Wallace
We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately - the object seemed incidental to this will to give ourselves away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. Flight from exactly what? These rooms, blandly filled with excrement and heat? To what purpose?
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Pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. per se.
David Foster Wallace
The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.
David Foster Wallace
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Based on Topics: Attention Quotes, Time QuotesBased on Keywords: arational, infantilely
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