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
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.
In practice
During a wedding speech, one might refer to this quote to express the uncontrollable nature of love.
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 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.
Their lips brushed like young wild flowers in the wind.
What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with this extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.
After all, damn it, what does being in love mean if you can't trust a person.
Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.
You are mistaken, Mr. Darcy, if you suppose that the mode of your declaration affected me in any other way, than as it spared the concern which I might have felt in refusing you, had you behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner.
Never in the world does hatred cease by hatred; hatred ceases by love.
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