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  "title": "Infinite Jest",
  "slug": "infinite-jest",
  "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/david-foster-wallace/infinite-jest",
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  "markdown": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/david-foster-wallace/infinite-jest.md",
  "author": {
    "name": "David Foster Wallace",
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      "slug": "that-you-will",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/david-foster-wallace/infinite-jest/that-you-will",
      "text": "That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.",
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          "name": "humor",
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        {
          "name": "judging others",
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      "slug": "the-so-called-psychotically",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/david-foster-wallace/infinite-jest/the-so-called-psychotically",
      "text": "The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames. Yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don‘t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.",
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      "slug": "what-if-sometimes",
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      "text": "What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love? What if the temple comes to Mohammed? What if you just love? without deciding? You just do: you see her and in that instant are lost to sober account-keeping and cannot choose but to love?",
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      "slug": "hal-whos-empty",
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      "text": "Hal, who's empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some sort of basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, goey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he's really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.",
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      "id": "688f9609-91f8-411e-862c-6f558895436c",
      "slug": "that-everyone-is-identical",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/david-foster-wallace/infinite-jest/that-everyone-is-identical",
      "text": "That everyone is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else. That this isn't necessarily perverse.",
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      "slug": "there-are-no-choices",
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      "text": "There are no choices without personal freedom, Buckeroo. It's not us who are dead inside. These things you find so weak and contemptible in us - these are just the hazards of being free",
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      "slug": "severity-is-in-the",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/david-foster-wallace/infinite-jest/severity-is-in-the",
      "text": "Severity is in the eye of the sufferer, it says. Pain is pain.",
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      "slug": "these-worst-mornings",
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      "text": "These worst mornings with cold floors and hot windows and merciless light—the soul’s certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer.",
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