You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
David Foster WallaceRead
What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love? What if the temple comes to Mohammed? What if you just love? without deciding? You just do: you see her and in that instant are lost to sober account-keeping and cannot choose but to love?
Interpretation
What this quote means
Love can be an uncontrollable force that we experience without conscious choice.
In this quote, David Foster Wallace explores the idea that love often transcends choice and rationality. He suggests that love can strike suddenly, leaving us devoid of the ability to weigh options or make calculations, as if we are drawn to it by an uncontrollable force, symbolically likening this to the expression 'the temple comes to Mohammed' which implies that sometimes circumstances lead us to love without us actively seeking it.
Themes
LoveChoiceEmotionSurrenderPassion
In practice
Example use cases
During a wedding speech, one might refer to this quote to express the uncontrollable nature of love.
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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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