“I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing.”
―.The Sandman

“Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.”
― The Sandman

“Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world, I mean everybody — no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds... Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe.”
― The Sandman

“There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts.”
― Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

“You get what anybody gets - you get a lifetime.”
― The Sandman

“I don't want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted just like that, and it didn't mean anything? What then?”
― Coraline

“You're always you, and that don't change, and you're always changing, and there's nothing you can do about it.”
― The Graveyard Book

“It's like the people who believe they'll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesn't work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you. If you see what I mean.”
― The Graveyard Book

“When we hold each other, in the darkness, it doesn't make the darkness go away. The bad things are still out there. The nightmares still walking. When we hold each other we feel not safe, but better. "It's all right" we whisper, "I'm here, I love you." and we lie: "I'll never leave you." For just a moment or two the darkness doesn't seem so bad.”
― Neil Gaiman's Midnight Days

“I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy.”
― The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“I am selfish, private and easily bored. Will this be a problem?”
― A Study in Emerald

“Then, one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...you give them a piece of you. They don't ask for it. They do something dumb one day like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore.”
― The Sandman

“Even nothing cannot last forever.”
― American Gods

Solitude
by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
_______________________
Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone;
For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
But has trouble enough of its own,
Sing, and the hills will answer;
Sigh, it is lost on the air;
The echoes bound to a joyful sound,
But shrink from voicing care.

Rejoice, and men will seek you;
Grieve, and they turn and go;
They want full measure of all your pleasure,
But they do not need your woe.
Be glad, and your friends are many;
Be sad, and you lose them all,—
There are none to decline your nectared wine,
But alone you must drink life’s gall.

Feast, and your halls are crowded;
Fast, and the world goes by.
Succeed and give, and it helps you live,
But no man can help you die.
There is room in the halls of pleasure
For a large and lordly train,
But one by one we must all file on
Through the narrow aisles of pain.

_________
#Poem
Explanation

David Foster Wallace
______________
Born : February 21, 1962
Died : September 12, 2008
______________
Was an American novelist, short-story writer, and essayist whose dense works provide a dark, often satirical analysis of American culture.

Wallace became best known for his second novel, Infinite Jest (1996), a massive, multilayered novel that he wrote over the course of four years. In it appear a sweeping cast of postmodern characters that range from recovering alcoholics and foreign statesmen to residents of a halfway house and high-school tennis stars. Infinite Jest was notably the first work of Wallace’s to feature what was to become his stylistic hallmark: the prominent use of notes (endnotes, in this case), which were Wallace’s attempt to reproduce the nonlinearity of human thought on the page.

Wallace had suffered from depression since his early 20s, and, after numerous failed attempts to find an efficacious drug regimen, he took his own life.

“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”
― Infinite Jest

“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”
― Infinite Jest

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”
― This Is Water

“You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.”
― Infinite Jest