“What I want everyone to know is that the sun is going to rise tomorrow whether you want it to or not. Life is tragic, but it’s also beautiful.”

“Hope crushed is another suicide waiting to happen.”

“If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most.Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.”

“Something she’d done since the first – she kept him from yielding to the dark lure of the water until he could see for himself the hope found in the dawn of each new day.”

“I’m sure we all have dreams of leaving at some time in our lives, but when we reach the bottom, most of us go running home.”

“Every November of my boyhood, we put on red poppies and attended highly patriotic services in remembrance of those who had ‘given’ their lives. But on what assurance did we know that these gifts had really been made? Only the survivors—the living—could attest to it. In order to know that a person had truly laid down his life for his friends, or comrades, one would have to hear it from his own lips, or at least have heard it promised in advance. And that presented another difficulty. Many brave and now dead soldiers had nonetheless been conscripts. The known martyrs—those who actually, voluntarily sought death and rejoiced in the fact—had been the kamikaze pilots, immolating themselves to propitiate a ‘divine’ emperor who looked (as Orwell once phrased it) like a monkey on a stick. Their Christian predecessors had endured torture and death (as well as inflicted it) in order to set up a theocracy. Their modern equivalents would be the suicide murderers, who mostly have the same aim in mind. About people who set out to lose their lives, then, there seems to hang an air of fanaticism: a gigantic sense of self-importance unattractively fused with a masochistic tendency to self-abnegation. Not wholesome.The better and more realistic test would therefore seem to be: In what cause, or on what principle, would you risk your life?”

“When you go against the flow of nature and betray the spiritual laws existing within, there is, and always will be, a negative reaction. Those who try escaping life before fate shakes their hand, will forever be stuck on earth, chained to the place they so badly wanted to leave. What a complicated misery. I guarantee you it will be torture to be invisible and ignored by those you love when you can see them – but you are already dead for them to hear you utter another word. Talk about agony, more so, than remaining on this plane and continuing your spiritual cycle as it was written to be lived.”

“And so I have to live. Because we live for more than just ourselves, Most of the time we live for others, keep putting one foot before the other, left and right, left and right, so that walking becomes a habit, just like breathing. Ina n out, left and right.”

“The body tries to stop the mind from killing itself, no matter the cost. It is only the lack of strength, the fatigue that lets the jumpers fall at last.”

“What do you want to do with your life, then?” is often the question I’m asked.To be honest, I don’t know. I really don’t.Mainly because I don’t see myself living long enough for that to make much of a difference.”

“It is always consoling to think of suicide;it’s what gets one through many a bad night.”

“God forgive me everything!’ she said, feeling the impossibility of struggling…”

“To learn is to broaden, to experience more, to snatch new aspects of life for yourself. To refuse to learn or to be relieved at not having to learn is to commit a form of suicide; in the long run, a more meaningful type of suicide than the mere ending of physical life. Knowledge is not only power; it is happiness, and being taught is the intellectual analog of being loved.”

“I could smack her, punch her in the face, but then I see what she can’t hide from me. I’ve seen it before-the desperation, the agony, the need to find a reason to go on, and the inability to find it.”

“I mentally bless and exonerate anyone who has kicked a chair out from beneath her or swallowed opium in large chunks. My mind has met their environment, here in the void. I understand perfectly.”