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David Foster Wallace Quotes about Pain

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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

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.

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

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

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 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

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

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