You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
David Foster WallaceRead
To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Icons represent abstract ideas rather than real, living connections with individuals.
This quote by David Foster Wallace suggests that when we elevate someone to the status of an icon, we strip away their humanity and complexities, reducing them to an abstraction. As a result, this abstraction can create a disconnect, preventing genuine communication and understanding with real, living people, thereby emphasizing the importance of connecting on a human level rather than idolizing figures as mere symbols.
Themes
IconAbstractionCommunicationHuman ConnectionPhilosophy
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about celebrity culture, one might say, 'As David Foster Wallace pointed out, making someone an icon reduces them to an abstraction, hindering genuine communication.'
More from David Foster Wallace
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It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most 'familiarity' is meditated and delusive.
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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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Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.
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David Foster WallaceRead
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