You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
David Foster WallaceRead
If you've never wept and want to, have a child.
Interpretation
Having a child can evoke deep emotional experiences, including the potential for profound love and sorrow.
David Foster Wallace's quote suggests that parenthood is a profound emotional journey, filled with the capacity for tears and intense feelings. It implies that the experience of raising a child opens one up to the full spectrum of human emotions, bringing both joy and heartache, which can lead to personal growth and deeper connections.
In practice
In a speech about the challenges and joys of parenthood.
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.
In families like mine, there is no crime worse than telling the truth.
My dad has always taught me these words: care and share.
When you smell our candles burning, what does it make you think of, my child?" Winterfell, she might have said. I smell snow and smoke and pine needles. I smell the stables. I smell Hodor laughing, and Jon and Robb battling in the yard, and Sansa singing about some stupid lady fair. I smell the crypts where the stone kings sit. I smell hot bread baking. I smell the godswood. I smell my wolf. I smell her fur, almost as if she were still beside me. "I don't smell anything," she said.
In the long view, no nation is any healthier than its children.
My mother didn't want me to be in fashion. She was in the fashion business, so was my brother, and she thought it was too crazy for me. She wanted me to be married with children, to be independent, yes, but not to have a crazy life.
I didn't grow up in a traditional family, and I never had a family dinner around the table, so whenever I actually had a dinner 'plan,' it meant a lot to me; it made me feel excited and safe.
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