You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
David Foster WallaceRead
Almost anything that you pay close, direct attention to becomes interesting.
Interpretation
Focusing intently on something can reveal its inherent interest and significance.
David Foster Wallace's quote suggests that the act of paying close, direct attention to something transforms the way we perceive it, making it more interesting and meaningful. This idea emphasizes the power of mindfulness and engagement in our daily lives, encouraging us to delve deeper into the world around us and discover the beauty and complexity that may otherwise go unnoticed.
In practice
In a presentation about the importance of mindfulness practices.
You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
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 youβve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and itβs like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.
Nothing is more imminent than the impossible . . . what we must always foresee is the unforeseen.
But I'm glad you'll see me as I am. Above all, I wouldn't want people to think that I want to prove anything. I don't want to prove anything, I just want to live; to cause no evil to anyone but myself. I have that right, haven't I?
Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul.
In polite society, we call our obsessions hobbies.
One of the things that I've come to understand is that as I talk a lot about Picard, what I find is that I'm talking about myself.
I was absolutely convinced that I wouldn't win the Nobel Prize. My impression was that the Nobel Prize in Literature was given to people more or less affiliated with, let's say, socialist ideas, and that was not my case.
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