“I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously.”

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
Essays
Context: I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture — a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It’s maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it’s not these things, quite. It’s more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I’m small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It’s wanting to jump overboard.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously." by David Foster Wallace?
David Foster Wallace photo
David Foster Wallace 185
American fiction writer and essayist 1962–2008

Related quotes

Walker Percy photo
George Gordon Byron photo

“Farewell!
For in that word, that fatal word,—howe'er
We promise, hope, believe,—there breathes despair.”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

Canto I, stanza 15.
The Corsair (1814)

Jenny Han photo
Sören Kierkegaard photo
Jules Verne photo

“To describe my despair would be impossible. No words could tell it. I was buried alive, with the prospect before me of dying of hunger and thirst.”

Je ne puis peindre mon désespoir; nul mot de la langue humaine ne rendrait mes sentiments. J’étais enterré vif, avec la perspective de mourir dans les tortures de la faim et de la soif.
Source: Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Ch. XXVII: Lost in the bowels of the earth

Robert Olmstead photo
T.S. Eliot photo

“It's not the despair, Laura, I can stand the despair. It's the hope.”

Michael Frayn (1933) British writer

Clockwise (1986), cited from Malcolm Page File on Frayn (London: Methuen, 1994) p. 65.

Paddy Chayefsky photo

“It's hard for me to take your despair very seriously, Doctor. You obviously enjoy it so much.”

Paddy Chayefsky (1923–1981) American playwright, screenwriter and novelist

Barbara Drummond.
The Hospital (1971)

Related topics