concept

suicide Quotes

32 of the best book quotes about suicide
01
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“I’ve committed to nothing...and that’s just suicide...by tiny, tiny increments.”
Nick Hornby
author
High Fidelity
book
life
reality
commitment
suicide
hard life
committed
without purpose
tiny
concepts
02
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“A hundred times I was upon the point of killing myself; but still I loved life. This ridiculous foible is perhaps one of our most fatal characteristics; for is there anything more absurd than to wish to carry continually a burden which one can always throw down? to detest existence and yet to cling to one’s existence? in brief, to caress the serpent which devours us, till he has eaten our very heart?”
Voltaire
author
The Old Woman
character
life
burdens
suicide
concepts
03
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“I open up a paper clip and scratch it across the inside of my left wrist. Pitiful. If a suicide attempt is a cry for help, then what is this? A whimper, a peep? I draw little windowcracks of blood, etching line after line until it stops hurting. It looks like I arm-wrestled a rosebush.”
04
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“Evelyn was a miserable and resentful wife before she met Mrs. Threadgoode at the Rose Terrance Nursing Home. Before their meeting, she often thought about committing suicide because she was so unhappy and depressed with the way her life was going.”
05
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“Families are as sick as their secrets. The secrets are what they are ashamed of. Family secrets can go back for generations. They can be about suicides, homicides, incest, abortions, addictions, public loss of face, financial disaster, etc. All the secrets get acted out. This is the power of toxic shame.”
06
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“But I know what it’s like to want to die. How it hurts to smile. How you try to fit in but you can’t. You hurt yourself on the outside to try to kill the thing on the inside.”
07
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“The suicide rate among ranchers and farmers in the US is now about three times higher than the national average. The issue briefly received attention during the 1980s farm crisis, but has been pretty much ignored ever since.”
08
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“Nevertheless, after I went to bed, this idea of punishment and Purgatory came back on me crushingly. I remembered the account of Dives in torment, and shuddered. But Mr. Shimerda had not been rich and selfish: he had only been so unhappy that he could not live any longer.”
09
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“She felt somehow very like him—the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun. But she must go back. She must assemble.”
10
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“And this is for Colored girls who have considered suicide, but are moving to the ends of their own rainbows.”
11
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“Foolish woman. Don’t you realize this is just the beginning? We have the chance now to die with dignity.”
12
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Cowardice is nothing to do with it - suicide takes considerable courage. . . What’s selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching.
13
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People pontificate, “Suicide is selfishness.” Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call in a cowardly assault on the living. Oafs argue this specious line for varying reason: to evade fingers of blame, to impress one’s audience with one’s mental fiber, to vent anger, or just because one lacks the necessary suffering to sympathize.
14
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″ I am dying, Egypt, dying. Only I here importune death awhile until Of many thousand kisses the poor last I lay upon thy lips ”
15
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“Do not by any means destroy yourself, for if you live you may yet have good fortune, but all the dead are dead like.”
16
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″‘When this news was brought to me ...[I] caused my mare Hwin to be saddled and took with me a sharp dagger... And when my father’s house was out of sight and I was come to a green open place in a certain wood where there were no dwellings of men, I dismounted from Hwin my mare and took out the dagger. Then I parted my clothes where I thought the readiest way lay to my heart and I prayed to all the gods that as soon as I was dead I might find myself with my brother. After that I shut my eyes and prepared to drive the dagger into my heart.‘”
17
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“…They think of suicide as a quick route to oblivion, an escape. Far from it. It merely alters a person from one form to another. Nothing can destroy the spirit.
18
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“Suicide only precipitates a darker continuation of the same conditions from which escape was sought. A condition under circumstances so much more painful.”
19
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“Something sick at the heart of the country had infected the girls. Our parents thought it had to do with our music, our godlessness, or the loosening of morals regarding sex we hadn’t even had.”
20
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“It didn’t matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn’t heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.”
21
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“The essence of the suicides consisted not of sadness or mystery but simple selfishness.”
22
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“Cecilia had released an airborne virus which the other girls ... had contracted. ”
23
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“They made us participate in their own madness. ”
24
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“The outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself. ”
25
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“She had unbuckled us ... only to stall us, so that she and her sisters could die in peace. ”
26
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“I needed to find out when it all went horribly wrong. I needed to know if her heart had been so broken by this guy, Jake West, that she’d driven herself off a cliff. None of it seemed liked Amy.”
27
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“Amy left me her diary. She was afraid to die young like her mother. She was afraid to die. She talks about it in her diary. That’s why I know she didn’t commit suicide.”
28
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“The charred black spot where Amy’s car had landed sat directly below. It was as if my own jeep had turned against me, breaking down there on purpose to remind me that I was a jerk. Not that I needed reminding.”
29
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“The world says: “You have needs -- satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don’t hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more.” This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.”
30
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“As he plays their relationship over in his mind like a movie, he wonders: What if his heart’s delight doesn’t call? Will life be worth living then? ”
31
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“During her freshman year in college, both of her parents died—first her father from cancer, then her mother in a suicide caused by an interaction between psychiatric medications and alcohol.”
32
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“In China your father had a sister who killed herself. She jumped into the family well. We say that your father has all brothers because it is as if she had never been born.”

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