“…You see I believe in that stuff to: yoga and mystical powers. I once knew a man who could kill himself on command. Can you believe that? . . . Why do you laugh? . . . Believe it! By will of his own mind, he could make his heart stop beating for good’ My neighbor poised and looked seriously at me, searching in my eyes. ‘…You laugh!’ he repeated once more… ‘You laugh, but he was a master at it! He could commit suicide at his own will!’ Indeed, hearty laughter streamed through my nose. ‘Could he do it perpetually?’ I asked. ‘Perpetually…?’ My neighbor rubbed his waxy chin. ‘I mean, is he still able to do it?’ ‘I’m not sure I understand.’ ‘Well? Then is he dead…?!’My neighbor’s puzzled face slowly began to transform into a look of realization. ‘But sir,’ he said, ‘Of course he’s dead! I mean to say… this man could kill himself on command, you see. And you don’t come back from the dead!’ The two of us found ourselves crossing to the door so I could let my visitor out. I slapped him with friendliness on the shoulder. ‘No, you don’t come back from the dead,’ I agreed.”

“No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.”

“Every suicide is a solution to a problem.”

“Why is edamame always ready to expire? It´s so urgent for a vegetable. Edamame. It sounds like an assisted form of suicide. Is there an advertising concept in this?”

“Suicides? Heart attacks? The papers didn’t seem interested. The world was full of ways to die, too many to cover. Newsworthy deaths had to be exceptional. Most people go unobserved.”

“Sometimes I hear the world discussed as the realm of men. This is not my experience. I have watched men fall to the ground like leaves. They were swept up as memories, and burned. History owns them. These men were petrified in both senses of the word: paralyzed and turned to stone. Their refusal to express feeling killed them. Anachronistic men. Those poor, poor boys.”

“In spite of my suffering, at the thought that I was sure to end up by killing myself, I cried aloud and burst into tears.”

“Be gentle,always delicatewith every soulyou meet,for every single morningyou wake up,there is someoneWishing,silentlyand secretly,that theyhad not.”

“Suicide is an attack on society–an attack on its omnipotence, on its denial of death, and on its own despair.”

“Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die. What if it doesn’t fire? It has to fire. Could you crush that beloved skull with a rock?”

“You may say suicide is a loss of control and cowardly. Foolish as it may sound, I am prepared to argue.”

“I’ve been asked by lots of people, “What happens if you do kill yourself?” They want to know about what it would be like for other people around you, like the person who would find your body, the other kids at school, whoever would have to clean up the blood, what your family holidays would be like.”

“Whenever Richard Cory went down town,We people on the pavement looked at him:He was a gentleman from sole to crown,Clean favored, imperially slim.And he was always quietly arrayed,And he was always human when he talked;But still he fluttered pulses when he said,’Good-morning,’ and he glittered when he walked.And he was rich–yes, richer than a king–And admirably schooled in every grace:In fine, we thought that he was everythingTo make us wish that we were in his place.So on we worked, and waited for the light,And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,Went home and put a bullet through his head.”

“Prate not to me of suicide, Faint heart in battle, not for pride I say Endure, but that such end denied Makes welcomer yet the death that’s to be died.”

“The foolish rush to end their lives.Only the steadfast soul survives.”