suicide Quotes

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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.

“Foolish woman. Don’t you realize this is just the beginning? We have the chance now to die with dignity.”

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.

″‘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.‘”

“Do not by any means destroy yourself, for if you live you may yet have good fortune, but all the dead are dead like.”

“Suicide only precipitates a darker continuation of the same conditions from which escape was sought. A condition under circumstances so much more painful.”

“…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.

“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.”

“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.”

“I’ve committed to nothing...and that’s just suicide...by tiny, tiny increments.”

″ I am dying, Egypt, dying. Only I here importune death awhile until Of many thousand kisses the poor last I lay upon thy lips ”

“And this is for Colored girls who have considered suicide, but are moving to the ends of their own rainbows.”

“Cecilia had released an airborne virus which the other girls ... had contracted. ”

“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.”

“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.”

“The essence of the suicides consisted not of sadness or mystery but simple selfishness.”

“They made us participate in their own madness. ”

“The outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself. ”

“She had unbuckled us ... only to stall us, so that she and her sisters could die in peace. ”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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? ”

“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.”

“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.”

Don’t let Bill think too badly of me. He is a good fellow; look after him. He will be surprised. The young are always surprised. And thank you for letting me end my own way. I expect you did sympathize a little, you know.

“If I live, all would be changed; if I live, interest would be converted into doubt, pity into hostility; if I live I am only a man who has broken his word, failed in his engagements—in fact, only a bankrupt. If, on the contrary, I die, remember, Maximilian, my corpse is that of an honest but unfortunate man. Living, my best friends would avoid my house; dead, all Marseilles will follow me in tears to my last home. Living, you would feel shame at my name; dead, you may raise your head and say, ‘I am the son of him you killed, because, for the first time, he has been compelled to break his word.‘”

Dantès said, “I wish to die,” and had chosen the manner of his death, and fearful of changing his mind, he had taken an oath to die. “When my morning and evening meals are brought,” thought he, “I will cast them out of the window, and they will think that I have eaten them.”

“You know that I was a good mother, since it was for my son’s sake I became criminal. A good mother cannot depart without her son.”

“Note that this is most filthy and deadening and brutalizing work; that it is a cause of anemia, nervousness, ugliness, and ill-temper; of prostitution, suicide, and insanity; of drunken husbands and degenerate children—”

“and Sibyl Vane was my sister. She killed herself. I know it. Her death is at your door. I swore I would kill you in return. For years I have sought you. I had no clue, no trace. The two people who could have described you were dead. I knew nothing of you but the pet name she used to call you. I heard it to-night by chance. Make your peace with God, for to-night you are going to die.”

She tried to fling herself below the wheels of the first carriage as it reached her; but the red bag which she tried to drop out of her hand delayed her, and she was too late; she missed the moment. She had to wait for the next carriage. A feeling such as she had known when about to take the first plunge in bathing came upon her, and she crossed herself. That familiar gesture brought back into her soul a whole series of girlish and childish memories, and suddenly the darkness that had covered everything for her was torn apart, and life rose up before her for an instant with all its bright past joys. But she did not take her eyes from the wheels of the second carriage. And exactly at the moment when the space between the wheels came opposite her, she dropped the red bag, and drawing her head back into her shoulders, fell on her hands under the carriage, and lightly, as though she would rise again at once, dropped on to her knees. And at the same instant she was terror-stricken at what she was doing. “Where am I? What am I doing? What for?” She tried to get up, to drop backwards; but something huge and merciless struck her on the head and rolled her on her back. “Lord, forgive me all!” she said, feeling it impossible to struggle. A peasant muttering something was working at the iron above her. And the light by which she had read the book filled with troubles, falsehoods, sorrow, and evil, flared up more brightly than ever before, lighted up for her all that had been in darkness, flickered, began to grow dim, and was quenched forever.