You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
David Foster WallaceRead
...loneliness is not a function of solitude.
Interpretation
Loneliness is about emotional experience rather than physical being alone.
David Foster Wallace's quote emphasizes that loneliness stems from our emotional state and perceptions, rather than our physical circumstances of being alone. It reflects the idea that one can feel lonely even in a crowd if there is a lack of meaningful connection, highlighting the complexity of human emotions and the distinction between solitude, which can be fulfilling, and loneliness, which can be isolating.
In practice
Using this quote in a discussion about mental health and the importance of social connections.
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.
I take it that 'gentleman' is a term that only describes a person in his relation to others; but when we speak of him as 'a man,' we consider him not merely with regard to his fellow-men, but in relation to himself,--to life--to time--to eternity.
There is no partial sensitivity; either it is the state of one's whole being, total consciousness or it is not there at all
When our vices leave us, we like to imagine it is we who are leaving them.
Whatever is received is received according to the nature of the recipient.
I think... the history of civilization is an attempt to codify, classify and categorize aspects of human nature that hardly lend themselves to that process.
The more administrative machinery we construct, be it the most modern, the less place there is for the Spirit, the less place there is for the Lord, and the less freedom there is. It is my opinion that we ought to begin an unsparing examination of conscience on this point at all levels in the Church.
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