David Foster Wallace Quotes About Pain

Quotes about: Pain

• Is it possible really to love other people? If I’m lonely and in pain, everyone outside me is potential relief—I need them. But can you really love what you need so badly? Isn’t a big part of love caring more about what the other person needs? How am I supposed to subordinate my own overwhelming need to somebody else’s needs that I can’t even feel directly? And yet if I can’t do this, I’m damned to loneliness, which I definitely don’t want … so I’m back at trying to overcome my selfishness for self-interested reasons.

  David Foster Wallace

  Lonely, Pain, Loneliness

• 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.

  David Foster Wallace

  Pain, Real, Character

  "How Emmanuel Carrère Reinvented Nonfiction" by Wyatt Mason, www.nytimes.com. March 2, 2017.

• But if I decide to decide there’s a different, less selfish, less lonely point to my life, won’t the reason for this decision be my desire to be less lonely, meaning to suffer less overall pain? Can the decision to be less selfish ever be anything other than a selfish decision?

  David Foster Wallace

  Lonely, Pain, Selfish

  David Foster Wallace (2012). “Consider The Lobster: Essays and Arguments”, p.105, Hachette UK

• The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.

  David Foster Wallace

  Pain, Depressed Person, Essentials

• For these cultures, getting rid of the pain without addressing the deeper cause would be like shutting off a fire alarm while the fire's still going.

  David Foster Wallace

  Pain, Fire, Alarms

• The individual's right to pursue his own vision of the best ration of pleasure to pain: utterly sacrosanct.

  David Foster Wallace

  Pain, Vision, Pleasure

• Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?

  David Foster Wallace

  Pain, Agnostic, Infinite Jest

  David Foster Wallace (2011). “Infinite Jest”, p.39, Hachette UK

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