You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
David Foster WallaceRead
I don't want to hurt myself. I want to stop hurting.
Interpretation
The quote expresses a desire to cease suffering rather than inflict harm on oneself.
David Foster Wallace highlights a fundamental human wish to overcome pain and seek an end to suffering, emphasizing that the true goal is not self-harm but healing. This sentiment resonates deeply with those who may struggle with emotional turmoil, urging introspection and the pursuit of relief and understanding rather than destructive behaviors.
In practice
In a mental health seminar discussing coping mechanisms.
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.
Activism is not a journey to the corner store. It is a plunge into the unknown. The future is always dark.
My mother raised me to be bold. If I do not go, I will spend the rest of my life wondering what might have happened if I had." "If you do go, the rest of your life may be too short for wondering. - Asha & Rodrick
Never be ashamed! There's some who'll hold it against you, but they're not worth bothering with.
Am I afraid of high notes? Of course I am afraid. What sane man is not?
We live in the kind of world where courage is the most essential of virtues; without courage, the other virtues are useless.
Coraline shivered. She preferred her other mother to have a location: if she were nowhere, then she could be anywhere. And, after all, it is always easier to be afraid of something you cannot see.
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