“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.
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David Foster Wallace 185
American fiction writer and essayist 1962–2008Related quotes

Canto I, stanza 15.
The Corsair (1814)

Source: 1840s, The Sickness unto Death (July 30, 1849), p. 49
Source: The Worldly Philosophers (1953), Chapter VI, Karl Marx, p. 128
“It's not the despair, Laura, I can stand the despair. It's the hope.”
Clockwise (1986), cited from Malcolm Page File on Frayn (London: Methuen, 1994) p. 65.

“It's hard for me to take your despair very seriously, Doctor. You obviously enjoy it so much.”
Barbara Drummond.
The Hospital (1971)