Beginning to collect quotes

1. And worse I may be yet. The worst is not,
So long as we can say, "This is the worst."

Shakespeare, King Lear.
Found in Pippin's Modernism as a Philosophical Problem.

This passage gestures at nihilism as a problem of finitude: the worst would be if I were not alive to say this is the worst. Particular things I suffer in this world are of a different order than the suffering of death.

2. The greatest poverty is not to live
In a physical world, to feel that one's desire
Is too difficult to tell from despair...

Wallace Stevens, Esthetique du Mal.
Found in Butler's Subjects of Desire.

This passage gestures at nihilism as a problem of desire, or how desire is co-opted by despair. Insofar as satisfaction of one's desire is equatable to a) the depth of what will be loss in death, or b) the death of desire itself (desire is ephemeral, disappears, is not "physical"), it seems that desire itself produces despair and nihilistic suffering rather than pleasure. Here, the greatest poverty is articulated as living in a world of desire, which is so to speak cursed with producing despair, and this curse makes death a lesser poverty. Under world conditions where one cannot tell the difference, it would be better that the world was not. The question persists, is this inherent in the structure of desire itself, and if so, is there something else in existence, other than desire that can outweigh the despair.