You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
David Foster WallaceRead
Fiction, poetry, music...these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Art forms like fiction, poetry, and music provide a space to confront and transform feelings of loneliness.
In this quote, David Foster Wallace expresses how various art forms serve as a refuge for emotions such as loneliness. He suggests that through engaging with fiction, poetry, and music, one is able to not only face loneliness but also transcend and redefine it, finding comfort and understanding within these creative expressions.
Themes
ArtLonelinessTransformationPoetryMusicFiction
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about the importance of creativity in mental health, one might cite this quote to highlight how art offers solace.
More from David Foster Wallace
All quotes βEverything 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.
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It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most 'familiarity' is meditated and delusive.
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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 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.
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Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.
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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.
David Foster WallaceRead
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