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David Foster Wallace Quotes about Loneliness

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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

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

You don't have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness ... has to do with angst about death, the recognition that I'm going to die, and die very much alone, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily on without me.

David Foster Wallace
Loneliness, Writing, Thinking

Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.

David Foster Wallace
Lonely, Loneliness, Psychics
David Foster Wallace (2012). “A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again”, p.21, Hachette UK

We're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we've never even met?

David Foster Wallace
Lonely, Loneliness, Being Alone
"The Oscars Get It All Wrong Again: David Foster Wallace and the Best Film of 2015" by Allen Callaci, www.huffingtonpost.com. January 19, 2016.

The point of books is to combat loneliness.

David Foster Wallace
Loneliness, Book, Combat
"Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself". Book by David Lipsky, www.nytimes.com. 2010.

Most of the writers I know are weird hybrids. There's a strong streak of egomania coupled with extreme shyness. Writing's kind of like exhibitionism in private. And there's also a strange loneliness, and a desire to have some kind of conversation with people, but not a real great ability to do it in person.

David Foster Wallace
Strong, Real, Loneliness

Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties - all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion - these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.

David Foster Wallace
Sex, Loneliness, Party

...loneliness is not a function of solitude.

David Foster Wallace
Loneliness, Solitude, Function
David Foster Wallace (2011). “Infinite Jest”, p.145, Hachette UK

Fiction, poetry, music...these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.

David Foster Wallace
Loneliness, Fiction, Treated

Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved.

David Foster Wallace
Loneliness, Fiction, Relieved

The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.

David Foster Wallace
Loneliness, Interesting, Being Lonely

But the young educated adults of the 90s -- who were, of course, the children of the same impassioned infidelities and divorces Mr. Updike wrote about so beautifully -- got to watch all this brave new individualism and self-expression and sexual freedom deteriorate into the joyless and anomic self-indulgence of the Me Generation. Today's sub-40s have different horrors, prominent among which are anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without once having loved something more than yourself.

David Foster Wallace
Children, Loneliness, Divorce

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