“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
―
―
“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”
― Infinite Jest
― Infinite Jest
“A feeling of sorrow began to rise up inside Teresa, but was stopped before it became painful. Sometimes she thought she could see the medication working in her body. What she saw was a chainsaw; the blade shot out and sheared off the top and bottom of her emotional register. The crown and the roots., Leaving her with a bare trunk to drag around.”
―
―
“A strange calmness had overcome her with her realization that she no longer cared. A tension inside her head had been released, an enigmatic, ticking mechanism had ceased to operate, and now she floated in the pool of circumstances that had drowned her desires, was held fast in it, like scum on the surface of a pond.”
― Devil Take the Blue-tail Fly
― Devil Take the Blue-tail Fly
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