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"We're all on each other's food chain. All of us. It's an individual sport. Welcome to the meaning of individual. We're each deeply alone here. It's what we all have in common, this aloneness."
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Exlpore more Solitude quotes

"You become a house where the wind blows straight through, because no one bothers the crack in the window or lock on the door, and you're the house where people come and go as they please, because you're simply too unimpressed to care. You let people in who you really shouldn't let in, and you let them walk around for a while, use your bed and use your books, and await the day when they simply get bored and leave. You're still not bothered, though you knew they shouldn't have been let in in the first place, but still you just sit there, apathetic like a beggar in the desert."

"We enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness. True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation.One's inner voices become audible. One feels the attraction of one's most intimate sources.In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives. The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature, the more fully one enters into the communion of all creatures."

"Novelty is a new kind of loneliness."

"You must suffer me to go my own dark way."

"You can never be annoyed by anyone when you are just alone, insults comes from being too familiar even with the most respectful persons."

"How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself."

"The man I meet with is not often so instructive as the silence he breaks."

"We rarely find answers in the distractions. But oh what possibilities live within the quiet of solitude.In my fear to be alone,I distracted myself away from the deep beauty of my own solitude."

"I wish to spend a lifetime near a lighthouse where loneliness will be the glimmer of luminous prancing upon ocean waves, rising and falling only for my breathing."
Explore more quotes by David Foster Wallace

"You know, the whole thing about perfectionism. The perfectionism is very dangerous. Because of course if your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything. Because doing anything results in...it's actually kind of tragic because you sacrifice how gorgeous and perfect it is in your head for what it really is. And there were a couple of years where I really struggled with that."

"I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader."

"Why do prostitutes when they get straight always try and get so prim? It's like long-repressed librarian-ambitions come flooding out."

"One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism."

"A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane."

"Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere Mary went, the lights became erratic."
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