You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
David Foster WallaceRead
We're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we've never even met?
Interpretation
What this quote means
We often feel a sense of longing or loneliness for unknown connections or experiences.
David Foster Wallace's quote reflects the profound human experience of loneliness that transcends our immediate relationships. It suggests that we may yearn for deeper connections or understandings, even with people we have never encountered, highlighting a universal search for meaning and belonging in our lives.
Themes
LonelinessLongingConnectionExistenceSearching
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about mental health, this quote could illustrate the unseen battles many face with loneliness.
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.
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It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most 'familiarity' is meditated and delusive.
David Foster WallaceRead
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 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.
David Foster WallaceRead
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