All Quotes By Tag: Suicide

“Girls are always saying things like, “I’m so unhappy that I’m going to overdose on aspirin,” but they’d be awfully surprised if they succeeded. They have no intention of dying. At the first sight of blood, they panic.”

“Self-destruction would be a brief, almost autoerotic free-fall into a great velvet darkness.”

“He was lovable the way a child is lovable, and he was capable of returning love with a childlike purity. If love is nevertheless excluded from his work, it’s because he never quite felt that he deserved to receive it. He was a lifelong prisoner on the island of himself. What looked like gentle contours from a distance were in fact sheer cliffs. Sometimes only a little of him was crazy, sometimes nearly all of him, but, as an adult, he was never entirely not crazy. What he’d seen of his id while trying to escape his island prison by way of drugs and alcohol, only to find himself even more imprisoned by addiction, seems never to have ceased to be corrosive of his belief in his lovability. Even after he got clean, even decades after his late-adolescent suicide attempt, even after his slow and heroic construction of a life for himself, he felt undeserving. And this feeling was intertwined, ultimately to the point of indistinguishability, with the thought of suicide, which was the one sure way out of his imprisonment; surer than addiction, surer than fiction, and surer, finally, than love.”

“When the suicide arrived at the sky, the people there asked him: “Why?” He replied: “Because no one admired me.”

“I thought about suicide all the time, but it seemed toomuch effort, swallowing all those pills or jumping off things. If I’d lived out in the country I would have found a quiet stretch of railway track, and lain on it, fallen asleep, so that I would never have known when my last moment came. In London, the minimum tube fare had gone up so much that even to get near the line cost a fortune. Suicide seemed an extravagance I couldn’t afford. People never leave you alone, either; I knew that if I’d tried to lie down on the line, any number of commuters would have pulled me off again, so that I didn’t delay their train. There must have been murderers out there who wanted to kill, with no way of finding those who wanted to be dead. If there had been some way of contacting them, a date-with-death line, I would have called them to set up a meeting. The current ways of death seemed too haphazard; it was all left up to chance. Had Chance come up, tapped me on the shoulder, said “Oi, you – long black tunnel, white light, off you go,” I wouldn’t have complained. It was like having frostbite all over – feeling numb and in pain at the same time.”

“I cared about them. I wanted them to feel better, to live better lives. And then it occurred to me – I cared about myself. I wanted me to live a better life, too Caring about myself was allowing me to care about others.”

“She already felt dead in everything but name. What remained to be taken from her? She longed to be enfolded, welcomed, into the earth – to breathe no more, love no more, hurt no more”

“I knew that I had been partially right in the storeroom above the bar on Christmas Day. Whoever I had become had to die.”

“We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It’s as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out windows, or drown themselves, or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us are slowly devoured by some disease, or, if we’re very fortunate, by time itself. There’s just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds & expectations, to burst open & give us everything we’ve ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) know these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning, we hope, more than anything for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so.”

“There is a certain right by which we many deprive a man of life, but none by which we may deprive him of death; this is mere cruelty.”

“He wipes tears off my face and then snot. He uses his hands. He loves me that much.”

“He could not stand. It was notThat he could not thrive, he was bornWith everything but the will –That can be deformed, just like a limb.Death was more interesting to him.Life could not get his attention.”

“Suicide sometimes proceeds from cowardice, but not always; for cowardice sometimes prevents it; since as many live because they are afraid to die, as die because they are afraid to live”

“When you were a child, you used to run to me for protection. Now, in moments of weakness, I want to hide my head on your knees; I want you to be strong and wise; I want you to protect and defend me. I’m not always strong in spirit, Vitya – I can be weak too. I often think about suicide, but something holds me back – some weakness, or strength, or irrational hope.”

“Mind led bodyto the edge of the precipice.They stared in desireat the naked abyss.If you love me, said mind,take that step into silence.If you love me, said body,turn and exist.”