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.
To the ego, loving and wanting are the same, whereas true love has no wanting in it, no desire to possess or for your partner to change.
God is love, generosity and forgiveness; if we believe in this, we will never allow our weaknesses to paralyse us.
I was so sentimental about you I'd break any one's heart for you. My, I was a damned fool. I broke my own heart, too. It's broken and gone. Everything I believe in and everything I cared about I left for you because you were so wonderful and you loved me so much that love was all that mattered. Love was the greatest thing, wasn't it?
I will remember the kisses, our lips raw with love, and how you gave me everything you had and how I offered you what was left of me.
The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons.
If you're lucky enough to fall in love, that's one thing. Otherwise all that was ever truly beautiful to me was boyhood. It's the meal we sup on for the rest of our lives. Love puts the icing on life. But if you don't find it...you must call on your childhood memories over and over till you do.
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