“A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
Stories about finding your heart and soul around the world.
Adjust your default settings, David Foster Wallace in his own words.
“That what we have, we prize not the worth
whiles we enjoy it, but, being
lacked and lost…then we find
the virtue that possession would not show us
whiles it was ours.”
“When my younger sister came back from France
for the first time she had clothes
and perfume that swept the house
as if she had come upon a stolen treasure all at once.
Her face was a movie
star’s, the thin line
of her eyebrows traced the delicate
script of Europe,
unreadable to us.
She could no longer find words
for common things
and uncommon emotions,
she maintained, were best left
in the original.”
“It was different for me because what is interesting and rich is to change your culture, to go somewhere where you are not used to the codes, where you are not used to the places and the language, where everything is new and you have to adapt. Because then you become super alive. Every minute you are trying to understand something. You are not passive at all.
…And you have to ask yourself, what am I doing here? What is my place here? What do I want? And so you have all these questions about, what do I want in my life now? You know, all of the things that are very positive for your evolution, and also for the writing because you are going inside a lot.”
“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again — to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.”