You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
It was when I was the age where you can, as they say, "hear voices" without worrying that something is wrong with you. I "heard voices" all the time as a small child.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on the innocence of childhood and the imaginative freedom that comes with it.
David Foster Wallace's quote captures the essence of childhood imagination, a time when young minds are open to creativity and interpret the world with wonder. The idea of 'hearing voices' symbolizes the vibrant internal dialogues and fantasies that children experience, which adults often dismiss as mere imagination or concern for mental health. This perspective invites contemplation on how societal norms shape our understanding of reality as we grow older and the value of embracing our inner voice.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about the importance of nurturing creativity in children.
More from David Foster Wallace
All quotes →Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.
It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most 'familiarity' is meditated and delusive.
Under fun's new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don't want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers share and respond to, feel.
Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.
Bliss - a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious - lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.
Similar quotes
No hero is mortal till he dies.
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God will never reject you. Whether you accept Him is your decision.
There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.
I do ask myself why I make people so enraged, because I only ever say what I think. And while I know it might not be everyone's point of view, that doesn't seem particularly intolerable to me.
Given the accelerating velocity of history, we should begin charting deliberately the next phase in its trajectory.