c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Since you seldom spoke, you were rarely wrong. You seldom spoke because you seldom went out. If you did go out, you listened and watched. Now, since you no longer speak, you will always be right. In truth, you do still speak: through those, like me, who bring you back to life, and interrogate you. We hear your responses and admire their wisdom. If the facts turned out to contradict your counsel, we blame ourselves for having misinterpreted you. Yours are the truths, ours are the errors.
— Édouard Levé, Suicide
I don't have to kill myself, living my life is just the same.
— Aaron Scheerer
We who were not so pathologically far out on the spectrum of self-involvement, we dwellers of the visible spectrum who could imagine how it felt to go beyond violet but were not ourselves beyond it, could see that David was wrong not to believe in his lovability and could imagine the pain of not believing in it. How easy and natural love is if you are well! And how gruesomely difficult--what a philosophically daunting contraption of self-interest and self-delusion love appears to be--if you are not! And yet ... the difference between well and not well is in more respects a difference of degree than of kind. Even though David laughed at my much milder addictions and liked to tell me that I couldn't even conceive of how moderate I was, I can still extrapolate from these addictions, and from the secretiveness and solipsism and radical isolation and raw animal craving that accompany them, to the extremity of his. I can imagine the sick mental pathways by which suicide comes to seem like the one consciousness-quenching substance that nobody can take away from you.
— Jonathan Franzen
I stood looking down out of the window. The street seemed miles down. Suddenly I felt as if I'd flung myself out of the window. I could see myself lying on the pavement. Then I seemed to be standing by the body on the pavement. I was two people. Blood and brains were scattered everywhere. I knelt down and began licking up the blood and brains
— Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
I used to think it utterly normal that I suffered from “suicidal ideation” on an almost daily basis. In other words, for as long as I can remember, the thought of ending my life came to me frequently and obsessively.
— Stephen Fry
(Looking at the tree) Pity we haven't got a bit of rope.
— Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
Oh Google, she thought I was suicidal.
— Rae Mariz, The Unidentified
Could you just imagine? If every suicide rose--think of Faulkner's Quentin Compson as a vampire. I don't hate the South I don't I don't. She wondered how they'd have worked it out in Cambridge when Quentin threw himself off the Andersen bridge into the Charles amid the odor of the honeysuckle, not the beer, sweat, rum, and tainted magnolias of this city, precariously beneath the level of the water. The Compson blood had thinned out; at least this way, he's restore it after a fashion.
— Susan Shwartz, Carpetbagger
And only after he said it did he realize that among the countless suicides he could remember, this was the first with cyanide that had not been caused by the sufferings of love. Then something changed in the tone of his voice.“And when you do find one, observe with care,” he said to the intern:“they almost always have crystals in their heart.
— Gabriel García Márquez
The Suicide, as she is falling,Illuminated by the moon, Regrets her act, and finds appallingThe thought she will be dead so soon.
— Edward Gorey
Death is easy. To live is the most painful thing I could imagine and I'm weak and no longer willing to fight.
— Hannah Wright
I've been accustomed to mysteries, holy and otherwise, since I was a child. Some of us care for orphans, amass fortunes, raise protests or Nielsen ratings; some of us take communion or whiskey or poison. Some of us take lithium and antidepressants, and most everyone believes these pills are fundamentally wrong, a crutch, a sign of moral weakness, the surrender of art and individuality. Bullshit. Such thinking guarantees tradgedy for the bipolar. Without medicine, 20 percent of us, one in five, will commit suicide. Six-gun Russian roulette gives better odds. Denouncing these medicines makes as much sense as denouncing the immorality of motor oil. Without them, sooner or later the bipolar brain will go bang. I know plenty of potheads who sermonize against the pharmaceutical companies; I know plenty of born-again yoga instructors, plenty of missionaries who tell me I'm wrong about lithium. They don't have a clue.
— David Lovelace, Scattershot: My Bipolar Family
You used to believe that with age you would become less unhappy, because you then would have reasons to be sad. When you were still young, your suffering was inconsolable because you believed it to be unfounded.Your suicide was scandalously beautiful…You died because you searched for happiness at the risk of finding the void. We shall have to wait for death before we can know what it is that you found. Or before leaving off knowing anything at all, if it is to be silence and emptiness that awaits us.
— Édouard Levé, Suicide
All of a sudden I became aware of a little star in one of those patches and I began looking at it intently. That was because the little star gave me an idea: I made up my mind to kill myself that night. I had made up my mind to kill myself already two months before and, poor as I am, I bought myself an excellent revolver and loaded it the same day. But two months had elapsed and it was still lying in the drawer. I was so utterly indifferent to everything that I was anxious to wait for the moment when I would not be so indifferent and then kill myself. Why -- I don't know.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man
Sit tight, I'm gonna need you to keep time Come on just snap, snap, snap your fingers for me Good, good now we're making some progress Come on just tap, tap, tap your toes to the beat And I believe this may call for a proper introduction, and well Don't you see, I'm the narrator, and this is just the prologue?Swear to shake it up, if you swear to listen Oh, we're still so young, desperate for attention I aim to be your eyes, trophy boys, trophy wives Swear to shake it up, if you swear to listen Oh, we're still so young, desperate for attention I aim to be your eyes, trophy boys, trophy wivesApplause, applause, no wait wait Dear studio audience, I've an announcement to make:It seems the artists these days are not who you think So we'll pick back up on that on another page And I believe this may call for a proper introduction, and well Don't you see, I'm the narrator and this is just the prologue Swear to shake it up, if you swear to listen Oh, we're still so young, desperate for attention I aim to be your eyes, trophy boys, trophy wivesSwear to shake it up, if you swear to listen Oh, we're still so young, desperate for attention I aim to be your eyes, trophy boys, trophy wivesSwear to shake it up, you swear to listenSwear to shake it up, you swear to listenSwear to shake it up, you swear to listenSwear to shake it up, swear to shake it upSwear to shake it up, if you swear to listen Oh, we're still so young, desperate for attention I aim to be your eyes, trophy boys, trophy wives Swear to shake it up, if you swear to listen Oh, we're still so young, desperate for attention I aim to be your eyes
— Panic at the Disco
He look'd a little disorder'd, when he said this, but I did not apprehend any thing from it at that time, believing as it us'd to be said, that they who do those things never talk of them; or that they who talk of such things never do them.
— Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders
Sometimes, people trying to commit suicide manage it in a manner that leaves them breathless with astonishment.
— Salman Rushdie
By then there had been other men. She'd flung herself at other closed windows. The windows never broke, but her heart, at the end, was in splinters.
— Rebecca Makkai, The Hundred-Year House
People ask why my brother killed himself. "Why would such a gifted journalist, whose works have won all the prizes in the world, do such a thing?" "He had so many friends, why would he want to leave them?" "But what about all he had to live for?" In a short space of time, I had a drawerful of articles wirtten by reporters pondering the death of one who, like them, made a living out of trying to sort out the truth, separating fact from conjecture. They were hell-bent on making sense out of this event.When they phoned, I told them they were going to fail. I told them that the problem with suicide is that it is a senseless event. There is no why.But of course that's wrong. There are numerous whys, though it's almost impossible, or unlikely that any single one of them is "the answer" that people want to hear.
— Christopher Lukas
Life without meaningcannot be borne.We find a missionto which we're sworn--or answer the callof Death's dark horn.Without a gleaningof purpose in life,we have no vision,we live in strife,--or let blood fallon a suicide knife.
— Dean Koontz
If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself, but to put myself back together again. Suicide will be for me only one means of violently reconquering myself, of brutally invading my being, of anticipating the unpredictable approaches of God. By suicide, I reintroduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will.
— Antonin Artaud
Why do people kill themselves?I think they do it when they can no longer find a reason to keep going. When nothing in heir lives is good enough to balance out the bad. And they do it when they no longer have the courage to carry on past some recent painful experience. They commit what is, in the end, a desperate, final call for help, that is hopefully heard in time by someone else. And what if it's not heard in time? I ask although I know the answer.Then they die.
— Mary Beth Miller, Aimee
Die, very good, but do not make others die. Suicides like the one which is about to take place here are sublime, but suicide is restricted, and does not allow of extension; and so soon as it affects your neighbors, suicide becomes murder.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
It was suicide, wasn't it?""In an involuntary sort of way," said Vorob'yev. "These Cetagandan political suicides can get awfully messy, when the principal won't cooperate.""Thirty-two stab wounds in the back, worst case of suicide they ever saw?" murmured Ivan, clearly fascinated by the gossip."Exactly, my lord.
— Lois McMaster Bujold, Cetaganda
You and your scars. Please! You don't kill youself like this!" I gesture, holding a wrist turned up to the ceiling, then pretending to cut across it with my other hand. "That's just a cry for help. That's just attention. Everbody knows that. Cutting across just gets you to the hospital. That's just from movies and TV shows and stuff like that. You didn't really try to kill yourself. you just wanted attention, but you screwed up. Try harder next time.
— Barry Lyga
Drowning,Drowning on the land,Drowning,It doesn't end.
— C.G. Visser
It puzzled K., at least it puzzled him looking at it from the policemen's point of view, that they had made him go into the room and left him alone there, where he had ten different ways of killing himself. At the same time, though, he asked himself, this time looking at it from his own point of view, what reason he could have to do so. Because those two were sitting there in the next room and had taken his breakfast, perhaps?
— Franz Kafka, The Trial
When we asked him to sum up his impression of the girls' emotional state at that point, he said, "Buffeted but not broken.
— Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides
I would have to go back into my past and deal with Adrian. My philosopher friend, who gazed on life and decided that any responsible, thinking individual should have the right to reject this gift that had never been asked for - and whose noble gesture re-emphasised with each passing decade the compromise and littleness that most lives consist of. 'Most lives': my life.
— Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
Crisis is what suppressed pain looks like
—  it always comes to the surface. It shakes you into reflection and healing.
It used to be said, not so long ago, that every suicide gave Satan special pleasure. I don't think that's true—unless it isn't true either that the Devil is a gentleman. If the Devil has no class at all, then okay, I agree: He gets a bang out of suicide. Because suicide is a mess. As a subject for study, suicide is perhaps uniquely incoherent. And the act itself is without shape and without form. The human project implodes, contorts inward—shameful, infantile, writhing, gesturing. It's a mess in there.
— Martin Amis, Night Train
Coping with any death is traumatic; suicide compounds the anguish because we are forced to deal with two traumatic events at the same time. According to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the level of stress resulting from the suicide of a loved one is ranked as catastrophic–equivalent to that of a concentration camp experience.
— Carla Fine, No Time to Say Goodbye
Poor little place,' he murmured with a sigh.She heard him. He said the most melancholy things, but she noticed that directly he had said them he always seemed more cheerful than usual. All this phrase-making was a game, she thought, for if she had said half what he said, she would have blown her brains out by now.
— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Anyone can be crazy. That's usually just because there's something screwed up in your wiring, you know? But suicide is a whole different thing. I mean, how much do you have to hate yourself to want to just wipe yourself out?
— Michael Thomas Ford, Suicide Notes
That sounds weird: "kill yourself." It makes it sound like you tried to murder someone, only that someone is you.
— Michael Thomas Ford, Suicide Notes
I am so stupid, so easily fooled. It's really almost funny. If I could lift a finger I would gladly kill myself.
— Will Christopher Baer, Kiss Me, Judas
Is this some kind of joke?""That's for me to know and you to find out.""Maybe you think it's funny to put up signs about people who want to commit sui
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
The anarch's study of the history of the caesars has more of a theoretical significance for him - it offers a sampling of how far rulers can go. In practice, self-discipline is the only kind of rule that suits the anarch. He, too, can kill anyone (this is deeply immured in the crypt of his consciousness) and, above all, extinguish himself if he finds himself inadequate.
— Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil
Preventing a suicide is not necessarily a beneficent act if it forces the potential suicide to continue in a life of misery.
— Gene Lester David Lester
After a long analysis of Robson’s suicide, we concluded that it could only be considered philosophical in an arithmetical sense of the term: he, being about to cause an increase of one in the human population, had decided it was his ethical duty to keep the planet’s numbers constant.
— Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
You can think about killing yourself a thousand times a day and each time it gets just a little bit more real. But the day you wake up and know beyond the shadow of a doubt you are going to go through with it, that is both the worst and best day of your life. When you accept it you will find it amazing that everything you were thinking about suicide before was wrong. Suddenly you realize suicide is easy and desirable and that brings relief. No one wants to die. The act of dying is horrific but the reward is being dead and that sounds glorious to me.
— T DogMan
I never for a moment considered killing myself, because it wouldn't have achieved anything.
— Sebastian Faulks, Engleby
Mary Hepburn was meanwhile murdering herself up in her room, lying on her bed with the polyethylene sheath of her "Jackie dress" swapped around her head. The sheath was now all steamed up inside, and she hallucinated that she was a great land tortoise lying on its back in the hot and humid hold of a sailing ship of long ago. She pawed the air in perfect futility, just as a land tortoise on its back would have done.As she had often told her students, sailing ships bound out across the Pacific used to stop off in the Galàpagos Islands to capture defenseless tortoises, who could live on their backs without food or water for months. They were so slow and tame and huge and plentiful. The sailors would capsize them without fear of being bitten or clawed. then they would drag them down to waiting longboats on the shore, using the animals' own useless suits of armor for sleds.They would store them on their backs in the dark paying no further attention to them until it was time for them to be eaten. the beauty of the tortoises to the sailors was that they were fresh meat which did not have to be refrigerated or eaten right away.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Galápagos
Suicide is not something I owe you or yours.
— Paolo Bacigalupi, The Drowned Cities
…there is rarely any rhyme or reason in suicides. They can be a cry for help gone wrong, or a punishment to those you’re leaving behind, or one fateful twenty-minute window when you lose your bearings and can’t find the reasons to go on.
— Mariel Hemingway, Out Came the Sun: Overcoming the Legacy of Mental Illness, Addiction, and Suicide in My Family
HC: You think I shall differently tomorrow? [about suicide]J: People do.HC: Yes, perhaps. If you're doing things in a mood of hot despair. But when it's cold despair, it's different. I've nothing to live for, you see.~Hilary Craven; Jessop
— Agatha Christie, Destination Unknown
I can’t help but think that if she was going to kill herself, she might as well have done it earlier. Perhaps when I was a toddler. Or better yet, an infant. It certainly would have made my life easier. I asked my uncle Hugh (who is not really my uncle, but he is married to the stepsister of my current mother’s brother’s wife and he lives quite closeand he’s a vicar) if I would be going to hell for such a thought. He said no, that frankly, it made a lot of sense to him. I do think I prefer his parish to my own.
— Julia Quinn, To Sir Phillip, With Love: The Epilogue II
A million people a year kill themselves. Between ten and twenty million people a year try to. Worldwide, men are over three times more likely to kill themselves than women.
— Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive
The suicide? What would he have done if death did not exist?
— Marty Rubin
Coincidences undeniably imply meaning.I am rereading Hart Crane.I notice the dateOn which he stepped off that boatWas April 26.Tomorrow is April 26.The year of his suicide was 1932.I was four.I am now fifty-one.One undeniable implication in this case thenIs that the year, today,Is 1979.Afterward, Crane’s mother scrubbed floors.Eventually, I may or may notJump overboard.Are there questions?
— David Markson, Collected Poems
Suicide. This is the exact opposite of last time, for this time I'm experiencing a kind of pleasure in life, in being alive, a pleasure in living that I've never experienced before, and I'm hopeful and confident that I can become someone with dignity. I know now why I couldn't change certain characteristics and certain things about myself, but it's not a problem anymore. Certain pathways I failed to open in the past have now opened. My whole self is radiating light. I see with clarity. I understand the cause and effect of the last year. What I had imagined I've now attained. It's as if I can see my life right in front of my eyes, and all I have to do is reach out and draw it in... Now I don't feel the acute pain I felt before; I feel enlightened, at peace. It's as if I've instantly found the secret of "Suffering", how to bear it and how to endure it... Yes, this time I've decided to kill myself not because I can't live with suffering and not because I don't enjoy being alive. I love life passionately, and my wish to die is a wish to live...Yes, I've chosen suicide. The endpoint of this process of "Forgiveness". Not to punish anyone or to protest a wrong. I've chosen suicide with a clarity I've never possessed before, with a rational resolve and sense of calm, in order to pursue the ultimate meaning of my life, act on my belief about the beauty between two people... I take complete responsibility for my life, and even if my physical body disappears upon death, I don't believe my spirit will disappear. As long as I have loved people fully, then I can be content fading into "Nothingness". If I'm using death to express my passion for life, then I still don't love her enough, don't love life enough. and I will reincarnate in a different form to love her and to be part of her life... So the death of my flesh really doesn't mean anything. Doesn't solve anything.Is this a tragedy? Will there be tragedy?
— Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre
The contemplation of suicide, however brooding and painful it might be, is an essential act that may ascend toward something other than what was originally thought of as an end itself, that is, to hastily commit the act without the pleasure of justifying. Like a spiritual meditation, the contemplation of suicide involves a meticulous process of intellectual and emotional planning over some dark and unbearable sleepless nights. Once the thought of suicide has already been decided upon, it becomes irreversible that no amount of justification can change the decision to consummate the act. But life itself is already an act of suicide, to invoke the French-Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran. So why rush, there’s always a romantic way—a particular time or place—to die. (Danny Castillones Sillada, The Pain and the Pleasure of Contemplating Suicide)
— Danny Castillones Sillada
I've thought a lot about suicide and near death experiences. I'm not saying I'm going to kill myself or anything. However, I've had a lot of passive thoughts about "what's the point?". I see life for what it is. We live, we procreate, we die. So the next gen can do it again. What's my purpose or point? Why bother? What do I have to live for? The near death experiences come in with me being curious about after life. If I knew I'd be okay would I just go there, would that change my mind about my purpose?
— Ben Caesar
It is not the case that one can create new people on the assumption that if they are not pleased to have come into existence they can simply kill themselves. Once somebody has come into existence and attachments with that person have been formed, suicide can cause the kind of pain that makes the pain of childlessness mild by comparison. Somebody contemplating suicide knows (or should know) this. This places an important obstacle in the way of suicide. One’s life may be bad, but one must consider what affect ending it would have on one’s family and friends. There will be times when life has become so bad that it is unreasonable for the interests of the loved ones in having the person alive to outweigh that person’s interests in ceasing to exist. When this is true will depend in part on particular features of the person for whom continued life is a burden. Different people are able to bear different magnitudes of burden. It may even be indecent for family members to expect that person to continue living. On other occasions one’s life may be bad but not so bad as to warrant killing oneself and thereby making the lives of one’s family and friends still much worse than they already are.
— David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence
This is not to offer a general recommendation of suicide. Suicide, like death from other causes, makes the lives of those who are bereaved much worse. Rushing into one’s own suicide can have profound negative impact on the lives of those close to one. Although an Epicurean may be committed to not caring about whathappens after his death, it is still the case that the bereaved suffer a harm even if the deceased does not. That suicide harms those who are thereby bereaved is part of the tragedy of coming into existence. We find ourselves in a kind of trap. We have already come into existence. To end our existence causes immense pain to those we love and for whom we care. Potential procreators would do well to consider this trap they lay when they produce offspring.
— David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence
I thought that when someone dies, a person changes. I thought you'd lose yoursense of being judged and caring about this judgement; I thought you'd hold life in thepalm of your hand and dance and water it with rain. I thought you'd be able to dance ina crowd and laugh. But I was wrong. I am insecure, more than I was before. I takethings for granted. I'm angry, mean, judgmental, critical, bitter and quick to assume. I am lethargic. I despise all around me. And then some days, I feel normal.
— Anna Akana, Surviving Suicide
You make me lovely, and it's so lovely to be lovely to the one I love...
— Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places
The saddest sorrow is to desire death while you have life.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Letty allowed her to ramble on while she looked around the wood, remembering its autumn carpet of beech leaves and wondering if it could be the kind of place to lie down in and prepare for death when life became too much to be endured.
— Barbara Pym, Quartet in Autumn
I had never really stopped thinking of how the smartest person I knew had, after much thought, decided that life was not worth it—that she'd be better off not living—and how was I supposed to live after that?
— Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing
Conscience is worse than death, some people commit suicide to evade it.
— Efrat Cybulkiewicz
How much can you really trust the promise of a suicidal farther?
— Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being
Today, take a pledge to love yourself. Do not cut, drown, get caught in the fire, or hang yourself. Reasons behind committing suicide can be cured!
— Nikita Dudani
Suicide is an act of man and not of the animal.
— Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved
...[M]en are put in a sort of guard-post, from which one must not release one's self or run away...
— Socrates, Apology, Crito and Phaedo of Socrates.
I am finding myself: it's deadly because only death concludes me. But I bear it until the end. I'll tell you a secret: life is deadly. I'll have to interrupt everything to tell you this: death is the impossible and intangible. Death is just future to such an extent that there are those who cannot bear it and commit suicide. It's as life said the following: and there simply was no following.
— Clarice Lispector
This is not the place!
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
A man reduced to despair by a series of misfortunes feels wearied of life, but is still so far in possession of his reason that he can ask himself whether it would not be contrary to his duty to himself to take his own life. Now he inquires whether the maxim of his action could become a universal law of nature. His maxim is: From self-love I adopt it as a principle to shorten my life when its longer duration is likely to bring more evil than satisfaction. It is asked then simply whether this principle founded on self-love can become a universal law of nature. Now we see at once that a system of nature of which it should be a law to destroy life by means of the very feeling whose special nature it is to impel to the improvement of life would contradict itself, and therefore could not exist as a system of nature; hence that maxim cannot possibly exist as a universal law of nature, and consequently would be wholly inconsistent with the supreme principle of all duty.
— Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals
From where would failed Americans leap if all of our towering buildings were razed to the ground? He envisions inflated airfares to Niagara Falls; renewed interest in the nations dams and gorges; long lines at the Grand Canyon, potential suicides being asked to take a numbered ticket, to wait their turn. Couldn't Al Qaeda see that we are killing our own well enough? Competitive society creates deep-rooted feelings of failure. On our own we succeed at self-termination; America needs no foreign aid from these murderers.
— Alex Kudera, Fight for Your Long Day
The suicide! What would he have done if death did not exist?
— Marty Rubin
I couldn't see killing myself if I had a book that was only half-read: Fountainhead, Catcher in the Rye, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, One Hundred Years of Solitude? No. I figured that those who killed themselves first had to finish whatever book they were reading...if it were any good, that is. Of course, there's always the occasional book that makes you want to throw yourself off a bridge just for having wasted your time reading it. But I usually finished those ones, too.
— Michael  Anthony, Civilianized: A Young Veteran's Memoir
This is what happens to the brain of those living with mental illnesses (more accurately, "brain illnesses"). The brain does not function as it should; life is out of control. The brain alters our bodies; thoughts are distorted, emotions are unregulated, and behaviors we once thought could never occur happen. One of the most challenging, exhausting, and painful phenomena we do as humans is to live and survive with these changes in our minds. The toll it takes on an individual's body and the people in their lives is, tragically, often too much to bear.-Dr. Daniel J. Reidenberg
— Kevin Hines, Cracked, Not Broken: Surviving and Thriving After a Suicide Attempt
It will generally be found that, as soon as the terrors of life reach the point at which they outweigh the terrors of death, a man will put an end to his life. But the terrors of death offer considerable resistance; they stand like a sentinel at the gate leading out of this world. Perhaps there is no man alive who would not have already put an end to his life, if this end had been of a purely negative character, a sudden stoppage of existence. There is something positive about it; it is the destruction of the body; and a man shrinks from that, because his body is the manifestation of the will to live.
— Arthur Schopenhauer
There are a lot of victims when it comes to addiction. I know there's an overdose epidemic. We see those faces. But then I see these other faces - the ones who commit suicide because they can't handle the pain. Those faces mean just as much to me.
— Donna Marsh
I was a prisoner inside my own body. I felt desperate, angry, stupid, confused, ashamed, hopeless and absolutely alone... and that this was of my own making. I could speak at home, how come I couldn't outside it? I have never been able to find the right words to describe what it was like. Imagine that for one day you are unable to speak to anyone you meet outside your own family, particularly at school/college, or out shopping, etc., have no sign language, no gestures, no facial expression. Then imagine that for eight years, but no one really understands. It was like torture, and I was the only person that knew it was happening. My body and face were frozen most of the time. I became hyperconscious of myself when outside the home and it was a relief to get back as I was always exhausted. I attempted to hide it (an impossible task) because I felt so ashamed that I couldn't do what other people seemed to find so natural and easy - to speak. At times I felt suicidal.
— Carl Sutton, Selective Mutism In Our Own Words: Experiences in Childhood and Adulthood
Don’t stop breathing just because night has fallen! Don't stop breathing just because you are sleeping
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
The desire to commit suicide, however, has at its base a belief that life cannot or will not improve. Although that may be the case in some instances, it is not true in all instances. Death, however, rules out hope in all instances. We do not have any data indicating that people who are dead lead better lives.
— Marsha M. Linehan, Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder
What I failed to see was that, by ending my life, I would cause interminable pain to my family and friends. I could not understand the heartbreak it would cause those around me. Nor did I consider that my brother, Joseph, might live the rest of his life in continual rage, or that my sister, Libby, might shut herself off from the world and fall into perpetual depression, silence, and sadness mistakenly blaming themselves for my death as many family members do when they lose someone they love to suicide. I certainly held no understanding of the enormous pain my mother and father would suffer because they lost their oldest son in such a terrifying and devastating way. They would not have a chance to watch me mature, marry, and perhaps have children. Instead, all of their hopes, aspirations, and dreams for me would be destroyed with my decision to end my life by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge.
— Kevin Hines
Write the story. Don't write sentences.
— James Patterson
As modern neurobiologists point out, the repetition of the traumatic experience in the flashbacks can be itself re-traumatizing; if not life-threatening, it is at least threatening to the chemical structure of the brain and can ultimately lead to deterioration. And this would also seem to explain the high suicide rate of survivor, for example, survivors of Vietnam.
— Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History
A neon-pink 3 flickered and instantly disappeared again into the dark. The sight of it on my own device now made me sick. I held my finger down on the menu screen; each little app logo began to vibrate. I deleted the 3. I contemplated deleting everything. Cleaning it all away. The idea had a charm, a self-cancellation, many little suicides, a way to dispatch myself without actually going anywhere.
— Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy
O my mistress, do not by any means destroy yourself, for if you live you may yet have good fortune but all the dead are dead alike!
— C.S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy
It's like we've been living in two different cities. You up here in all this marbled comfort, and me down there, killing myself in slow motion.
— Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire
Right then, in that office, with the realization that no one knew the truth about my life, my thoughts about the world were shaken. Like driving along a bumpy road and losing control of the steering wheel, tossing you—just a tad—off the road. The wheels kick up some dirt, but you’re able to pull it back. Yet no matter how tightly you grip the wheel, no matter how hard you try to drive straight, something keeps jerking you to the side. You have so little control over anything anymore. And at some point, the struggle becomes too much—too tiring—and you consider letting go. Allowing tragedy . . . or whatever . . . to happen.
— Jay Asher, Thirteen Reasons Why
to live asubstance-freelife under thepressures ofthe daily grindis state-sponsoredsuicide
— Phil Volatile, Crushed Black Velvet
Now life is given in exchange for pain and fear, and that's the basis of the whole deception. Now man is still not what he should be. There will e a new man, happy and proud. Whoever doesn't care whether he lives or doesn't live, he himself will be God. And that other God will no longer be.''So, that other God does exist, in your opinion?''He doesn't exist, but he does exist. In the stone there' no pain, but in the fear of the stone there is pain. God is the pain of the fear of death. Whoever conquers pain and fear will himself become God.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
It will generally be found that as soon the terrors of live reach the point where they outweigh the terrors of death, a man will put an end to his life.
— Arthur Schopenhauer
It's a singular sort of pain, watching the most beautiful creature self-destruct because you weren't able to find the red wire.
— Joyce Rachelle
Suicide is not a choice, it is what is left when everything else fails.
— Unknown
I hate forcing myself to go to bed to avoid committing suicide.
— Phil Volatile, Crushed Black Velvet
One, who suicides, is itself a killer and itself a victim. To trigger that has its decision, and own willingness, no one else.
— Ehsan Sehgal
Death is not the end! The exit for the world of mortals is the entrance to the world of immortals!
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
Responding to a suicide attempt by insisting that it must stop, and devoting the full resources of therapy to preventing it, is a communication with compassion and care at its very core.
— Marsha M. Linehan
I am to stupid to give up, not smart enough to die
— Michael J Granata, LillyMakar.com
The man who, in a fit of melancholy, kills himself today, would have wished to live had he waited a week.
— Voltaire
Suicide is not a way of ending pain
—  it's just a way of redistributing it.
Having difficult times and grief and brokenness, does not mean that life is over. These are just bumps in the road, obstacles to be overcome and made stepping stones into a long successful life.
— Teresa St. Frances, What Happens the Day After?
I think she was too tired to play anymore, she was in a hurry to get to Heaven so she didn't wait, why didn't she wait for me?
— Emma Donoghue, Room
Nothing scares me more than a failed attempt. The last thing I want is to end up in a wheelchair, eating pulverized food and being watched around the clock by some sassy nurse who has a not-so-secret obsession with cheesy reality TV.
— Jasmine Warga, My Heart and Other Black Holes
No matter how bad your life gets if you Execute yourself it won't get better!
— Stanley Victor Paskavich
Michael, in a motel in Twentynine Palms, a gun in his hands. Not at Meredith's, painting in an explosion of new creation. Not over on Sunset, digging through the record bins, or at Launderland separating the darks and lights. Not at the Chinese market, looking at the fish with their still-bright eyes. Not at the Vista watching an old movie. Not sketching down at Echo Park. He was in a motel room in Twentynine Palms, putting a bullet in his brain.
— Janet Fitch, Paint it Black
The terrifying experience and obsession of death, when preserved in consciousness, becomes ruinous. If you talk about death, you save part of yourself. But at the same time, something of your real self dies, because objectified meanings lose the actuality they have in consciousness.
— Emil M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair
I'm going to live to be twenty-five,' she said, 'then die.
— Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase
Meredith's father, the composer, who shot himself in this house. Came all the way from Vienna to shoot himself in LA. Escaped the Nazis but not himself.
— Janet Fitch, Paint it Black
Rory said he loved me but wouldn't hold my hand in public. & he wanted so badly to end the pain, but it never went away, it stayed with the people that loved him.
— Christopher Soto
Don’t kill yourself just because you think and feel you are empty. God needs empty vessels to fill!
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
Here’s a fact: Some people want to live moreThan others do.
— Sherman Alexie
She wished Michael had had a grandfather like this guy Morty, someone to tell him, "It's a rotten deal, the house always wins. Just sit at the table and play for all you're worth." Instead of one who showed him how to die.
— Janet Fitch, Paint it Black
Imagine how many suicide victims would still be with us, if only the right person said the right thing at the right time.
— Wayne Gerard Trotman
I personally don't think about jumping because things can't possibly get worse... To the contrary, I contemplate it because I believe things probably will.
— Tyler Knight, Burn My Shadow: A Selective Memory of an X-Rated Life
I’m happy to just be able to come across things. I don’t need to be happy. Happiness is a kind of cheap word. Let’s face it, I’m not the kind of cat that’s going to cut off an ear if I can’t do something. I would commit suicide. I would shoot myself in the brain if things got bad. I would jump from a window…you know, I can think about death openly. It’s nothing to fear. It’s nothing sacred. I’ve seen so many people die. Life’s not sacred either
— Bob Dylan, The Essential Interviews
It feels like someone is gripping my heart and twisting it. It feels like I can't breathe. I shut my eyes tightly against the memory that is threatening to surface. I can't br
— Ashley Earley, Alone in Paris
I don't mind a bit being labelled a suicide.
— Al Purdy
The basic Irrational Act which is renewed every moment of life, is not to commit suicide.
— Nanamoli Thera
But perhaps the most celebrated of these auto-incendiaries is Kalanos. You will remember, no doubt, that Kalanos (the Greek version of the Sanskrit Kalyāna) was an Indian ascetic—though not a Buddhist—who accompanied Alexander's army on its withdrawal from India. At a certain moment he announced that his time had come to die, and arranged for a funeral pyre to be constructed. He mounted the pyre, had it set alight, and, sitting cross-legged, remained motionless until his body was consumed by the flames. What an occasion! With the entire Greek army, and probably Alexander the Great himself, watching him; with each one of those hardened and undefeated veterans, themselves no stranger to pain and mutilations, wondering if he himself would be capable of such cold-blooded endurance: with the eyes of posterity upon him (his peculiar fame has come down for more than twenty centuries); and with the honour of Indian asceticism at stake (and Indian asceticism is India);—how could he fail? For a moment one could almost wish to have been Kalanos. And yet, from the point of view of Dhamma, all this is foolishness—a childish escapade.
— Nanavira Thera
It is customary, in England at least, for Coroners' courts to give the verdict 'Suicide while the balance of his mind was disturbed'. This insult automatically puts the victim in the wrong and reassures Society that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Have you ever noticed that Socialist governments have a particular horror of the individual's suicide? It is a direct criticism of their basic tenets.
— Nanavira Thera
Talking of suicide, it is perhaps noteworthy that both of Dostoievsky's characters kill themselves: Stavrogin out of indifference and self disgust; Kirilov, after years of planning the gesture, in order to demonstrate to mankind that there is no God and that men are free to do as they please. My suicide will be less didactic.
— Nanavira Thera
People think that those who commit suicide are against life—they are not. They are too lusty for life, they have great lust for life; and because life is not fulfilling their lust, in anger, in despair, they destroy themselves.
— Osho
A suicide is always, for those close to the deceased, a tragic and agonising event; but when it is accomplished by means of jam, one cannot be less than terrified.
— Benjamin Péret, Death to the Pigs and Other Writings
He had the desperation, not the courage, to be himself. Once you do that, you can’t go wrong, because you can’t make any mistakes when people love you for being yourself. But for Kurt, it didn’t matter that other people loved him; he simply didn’t love himself enough.
— Charles R. Cross, Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain
HELENA. What a fine day! Not too hot. [A pause.]VOITSKI. A fine day to hang oneself.
— Anton Chekhov, Uncle Vanya
We have yet to establish a permanent Mars colony for this reason: Trying to colonize Mars with humans is a known suicide mission that no one is talking about.
— Steven Magee
How could I feel something when... I always get screw up... good people get killed and bad people just make suicides.
— Deyth Banger
He killed himself for wanting to live, for wanting to find someone that would love him, someone that would actually love him enough to want to be with him in his life, he did found rare people like that in his lonely search but they were already with another someone, no need for him to interfere, he killed himself because all his dreams were never nothing more than dreams, he killed himself because he was a failure, he killed himself because that someone never showed up to him.
— Toni mastertfrf
Together, they read on his papers a survey of the most common words found in suicide notes and mass murder letters. Shame had come up over fifty times. Anger, thirty times. Corona, once. Heineken, once. Beer, thrice. On the next page, an advertisement by the National Health Board with the message “Unable to cry? Call us now.
— Sihan Tan, this is how you walk on the moon: an anthology of anti-realist fiction
If the Emperor had not delivered his [15 August 1945] address urging the Japanese people to lay down their swords—if that speech had been a call instead for the Honorable Death of the Hundred Million—those people on that street in Sōshigaya probably would have done what they were told and died. And probably I would have done likewise. The Japanese see self-assertion as immoral and self-sacrifice as the sensible course to take in life. We were accustomed to this teaching and had never thought to question it.
— Akira Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography
I realized that it was not as easy to commit suicide as to contemplate it. And since then, whenever I have heard of someone threatening to commit suicide, it has had little or no effect on me.
— Mahatma Gandhi, The Story of My Experiments With Truth
Time is one ramp putting you in the place going down by bus, but if you decide on this stop to stop and to run backward you will be there, but in different time and day... But this what has happen makes a big scar, look me my father is dead 25 days + 3 = 28 days from his dead, he suicided 27, so yesterday was the 27 day…
— Deyth Banger
What was his place? he wondered. Where was his world? He had sometimes stood on the riverbank and told himself: Deep down in the cold water is your world; a rock lashed to your feet is your clothing for that world. To enter it you need only to climb to the place above the rapids, where the pool is, where it is always calm, so it must be deep, and there bury yourself and leave a world that is not your own and find a garden, long fields already cleared and cribs already filled, a new place in which a weakness in a man is a matter for a word or chide, not a break through which the terrors of the world flow in.
— John Ehle, The Land Breakers
The more I love nature the least I'm afraid to die. I wouldn't mind being a part of the trees and the place that makes everything possible.
— Alex Guidroz
I had wanted to disappear, if only so the cancer could disappear with me. But the stars whispered that there was no such thing. You don’t ever disappear. You just change. You leave. You move on. But you never disappear. Even when you think you want to.
— Amy Harmon, The Song of David
Self-slaughter is an extravagant enactment of feeling sorry for oneself. Suicide is stingy act, because no matter how wretched our life may currently be, a person can always rise tomorrow and perform some small act of kindness for other people, care for a pet, or perform some other caring act that works towards preserving nature’s graciousness. To die of their own hand is to cheat other people and shortchange Mother Nature; it is taking without giving back in kind. What combats suicide is a sense of gratitude, a willingness to give to other people, and to cease living life as a taker. Without a profound appreciation for all that is living and devoid of a sincere willingness to contribute to the flourishing of all life forms, one can callously write off the value of their own life.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Although we amplify our cognitive degree of awareness and enhance our appreciation for life experiences by maturing, it also brings us death. Facing a certain death forces a person to examine the worthiness of continuing to live.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
If her mind had held even the smallest chance of a future, she would have had no reason to tell me anything at all, whether or not it could send her to prison. But this is what I know about people getting ready to walk off the edges of their own lives: they want someone to know how they got there. Maybe they want to know that when they dissolve into earth and water, that last fragment will be saved, held in some corner of someone's mind; or maybe all they want is is a chance to dump it pulsing and bloody into someone else's hands, so it won't weigh them down on the journey. They want to leave their stories behind. No one in all the world knows that better than I do.
— Tana French, Broken Harbour