You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
David Foster WallaceRead
We all suffer alone in the real world. True empathy's impossible. But if a piece of fiction can alow us imaginatively to identify with a character's pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with their own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on the isolation of human suffering and the potential of fiction to foster empathy and connection.
David Foster Wallace highlights the inherent loneliness that individuals experience in their struggles. He suggests that while true empathy may be difficult to achieve, engaging with fiction allows us to step into the shoes of characters and experience their pain. This imaginative identification can help us understand and recognize the suffering of others, leading to a sense of shared humanity and reducing our feelings of isolation. Ultimately, it emphasizes the nourishing power of storytelling in fostering connections between people.
Themes
EmpathyFictionSufferingConnectionHumanity
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about the importance of literature in understanding others.
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.
David Foster WallaceRead
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.
David Foster WallaceRead
Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.
David Foster WallaceRead
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
Similar quotes
A born king is a very rare being.
Jean-Jacques RousseauRead
Scenes are now to take place as will open the eyes of credulity and of insanity itself, to the dangers of a paper medium abandoned to the discretion of avarice and of swindlers.
Thomas JeffersonRead
It is not our job to apply laws that have not yet been written.
John Paul StevensRead
If you are serious about your religion, if you really wish to commit yourself to the spiritual quest, you must learn how to use psychochemicals. Drugs are the religion of the twenty-first_x000D_ century. Pursuing the religious life today without using psychedelic drugs is like studying astronomy with the naked eye because that's how they did it in the first century A.D., and besides_x000D_ telescopes are unnatural.
Timothy LearyRead
There is a place called ‘heaven’ where the good here unfinished is completed; and where the stories unwritten, and the hopes unfulfilled, are continued. We may laugh together yet.
J. R. R. TolkienRead
Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of his creation.
Norman MailerRead