I Have Wanted To Kill Myself

Spoken by the character Cunégonde in Candide (1759), Chapter 12, amid the novella's catalogue of sufferings — rape, enslavement, murder, and dispossession. The paradox — wanting to die while remaining in love with life — captures the novel's refusal to resolve into either Pangloss's facile optimism or pure despair. Voltaire was himself a man of enormous vitality who survived serious illness multiple times, spent years in exile, and fought legal battles on behalf of wrongly condemned men. The line is often read as a self-portrait: the philosopher who catalogued human cruelty without surrendering his attachment to the world.