You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
David Foster WallaceRead
To be a mass tourist, for me,...is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on the existential emptiness of mass tourism and its impact on self-identity.
David Foster Wallace's quote critiques the experience of mass tourism, highlighting how it can lead to a disconnection from one's true self and an unsettling realization of one's triviality in the grand scale of existence. He argues that while tourists contribute economically to their destinations, this role can be accompanied by feelings of insignificance and discomfort, suggesting that the rush and chaos of tourism can strip away genuine human experience and connection.
Themes
TourismExistentialismSelfIdentityCritique
In practice
Example use cases
This quote could be used during a discussion on the impacts of mass tourism on personal identity.
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
Many people find bald, unvarnished truths so disturbing, they prefer to ram their heads in the sand and start dreaming at the first sign of scientific reality.
Charlie BrookerRead
If I deny the authority of the State when it presents my tax bill, it will soon take and waste all my property, and so harass me and my children without end. This is hard, this makes it impossible for a man to live honestly, and at the same time comfortably, in outward respects.
Henry David ThoreauRead
To stand on one leg and prove God's existence is a very different thing from going on one's knees and thanking him.
Soren KierkegaardRead
The mullahs of the Islamic world and the mullahs of the Hindu world and the mullahs of the Christian world are all on the same side. And we are against them all.
Arundhati RoyRead
There is magic in my universe, but it's pretty low magic compared to other fantasies.
George R. R. MartinRead
Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already I am.
Thomas MertonRead