Kate Copp

“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.”
― David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

“If you run away from a thing just because you don't like it, you don't like what you find either.”
― John Wyndham, The Chrysalids

“How do you get so empty? he wondered. Who takes it out of you?”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale