Suicide Boys Quotes

Some people are just not meant to be in this world. It's just too much for them.

I wish I could draw you how I see you. I'd draw a boy with the most magnetic smile, and the kindest hands, and eyes that are gloomy, but can sometimes be bright. I'd draw a boy who deserves to see the ocean.

In his suicide note, Kurt Cobain wrote, "It's better to burn out than to fade away." He was quoting a Neil Young song about Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols. When I was twenty-four, I interviewed John Lennon. I asked him about this sentiment, one that pervades rock and roll. He took strong, outraged exception to it. "It's better to fade away like an old soldier than to burn out, " he said. "I worship people who survive. I'll take the living and the healthy.

And this was perhaps the first time in my life that death occurred to me as a reality. I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it—it, the physical act. I had thought of suicide when I was much younger, as, possibly, we all have, but then it would have been for revenge, it would have been my way of informing the world how awfully it had made me suffer. But the silence of the evening, as I wandered home, had nothing to do with that storm, that far off boy. I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.

Just above our terror, the stars painted this story in perfect silver calligraphy. And our souls, too often abused by ignorance, covered our eyes with mercy.

My father gave me a ruined boy to compensate for the fact that he does not love me. The boy is fragile, broken—broke himself—broke everything. I asked him why he did it. He said because the world was unlivable. He said it was unlovable, but I think he meant himself. I think he meant that loneliness is sometimes painful. I curl against him, tuck my head beneath his chin and listen to his heart. It says stay and wait. It says regret. He knows what it is to want love, a love so fierce you grow roots. I hear his heart say please. He went looking for angels and found me instead, girl of the sorrows, sad but not sorry. I waited for a sign, a star to fall. He reached for a knife and drew branches.

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

The idea of not being a kid anymore terrifies me. I am an adult and I have been hurled out of the world of boys and girls into the fray of men and women, and expected to function as a grown-up when I never functioned very well as a kid.

I can't join a gym! I'm depressed, not suicidal!

In my room, in the dark, I understood what I never had before, what no one else seemed to. I understood how a boy could go into the woods with a bullet and a gun and not come out. That there was no conspiracy, no evil influences or secret rituals; that sometimes there was only pain and the need to make it stop.

Suicide in the trenches: I knew a simple soldier boy Who grinned at life in empty joy, Slept soundly through the lonesome dark, And whistled early with the lark. In winter trenches, cowed and glum With crumps and lice and lack of rum, He put a bullet through his brain. No one spoke of him again. * * * * * You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye Who cheer when soldier lads march by, Sneak home and pray you'll never know The hell where youth and laughter go.

So I sit there kicked my heels, thinking about New Orleans, and watching a morbid blue-bottle fly attempt to commit suicide by butting his head against the windowpane.

This is the underside of my world. Of course you don’t want me to be stupid, bless you! you only want to make sure you’re intelligent. You don’t want me to commit suicide; you only want me to be gratefully aware of my dependency. You don’t want me to despise myself; you only want the flattering deference to you that you consider a spontaneous tribute to your natural qualities. You don’t want me to lose my soul; you only want what everybody wants, things to go your way; you want a devoted helpmeet, a self-sacrificing mother, a hot chick, a darling daughter, women to look at, women to laugh at, women to come for comfort, women to wash your floors and buy your groceries and cook your food and keep your children out of your hair, to work when you need the money and stay home when you don’t, women to be enemies when you want a good fight, women who are sexy when you want a good lay, women who don’t complain, women who don’t nag or push, women who don’t hate you really, women who know their job and above all—women who lose. On top of it all, you sincerely require me to be happy; you are naively puzzled that I should be wretched and so full of venom in this the best of all possible worlds. Whatever can be the matter with me? But the mode is more than a little outworn. As my mother once said: the boys throw stones at the frogs in jest. But the frogs die in earnest.

Many signs point to the fact that the youth of the Third World will no longer tolerate living in circumstances that give them no hope for the future. From the young boys I met in the demobilization camps in Sierra Leone to the suicide bombers of Palestine and Chechnya, to the young terrorists who fly planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, we can no longer afford to ignore them. We have to take concrete steps to remove the causes of their rage, or we have to be prepared to suffer the consequences.

Because . . . most of us think that the point is something to do with work, or kids, or family, or whatever. But you don't have any of that. There's nothing between you and despair, and you don't seem a very desperate person.' 'Too stupid.' 'You're not stupid. So why don't you ever put your head in the oven?' 'I don't know. There's always a new Nirvana album to look forward to, or something happening in NYPD Blue to make you want to watch the next episode.' 'Exactly.' 'That's the point? NYPD Blue? Jesus.' It was worse than he thought. 'No, no. The point is you keep going. You want to. So all the things that make you want to are the point. I don't know if you even realize it, but on the quiet you don't think life's too bad. You love things. Telly. Music. Food.

The self-esteem of western women is founded on physical being (body mass index, youth, beauty). This creates a tricky emphasis on image, but the internalized locus of self-worth saves lives. Western men are very different. In externalizing the source of their self-esteem, they surrender all emotional independence. (Conquest requires two parties, after all.) A man cannot feel like a man without a partner, corporation, team. Manhood is a game played on the terrain of opposites. It thus follows that male sense of self disintegrates when the Other is absent.

To get through the night, I sometimes imagined the sky filled with a canopy of stars. I imagined that each star contained the soul of a girl or boy who had died too young, and the light the stars gave off was their brightness.

Once upon a time there was a young prince who believed in all things but three. He did not believe in princesses, he did not believe in islands, he did not believe in God. His father, the king, told him that such things did not exist. As there were no princesses or islands in his father's domains, and no sign of God, the young prince believed his father. But then, one day, the prince ran away from his palace. He came to the next land. There, to his astonishment, from every coast he saw islands, and on these islands, strange and troubling creatures whom he dared not name. As he was searching for a boat, a man in full evening dress approached him along the shore. Are those real islands?' asked the young prince. Of course they are real islands,' said the man in evening dress. And those strange and troubling creatures?' They are all genuine and authentic princesses.' Then God must exist!' cried the prince. I am God,' replied the man in full evening dress, with a bow. The young prince returned home as quickly as he could. So you are back,' said the father, the king. I have seen islands, I have seen princesses, I have seen God,' said the prince reproachfully. The king was unmoved. Neither real islands, nor real princesses, I have seen God,' said the prince reproachfully. The king was unmoved. Neither real islands, nor real princesses, nor a real God exist.' I saw them!' Tell me how God was dressed.' God was in full evening dress.' Were the sleeves of his coat rolled back?' The prince remembered that they had been. The king smiled. That is the uniform of a magician. You have been deceived.' At this, the prince returned to the next land, and went to the same shore, where once again he came upon the man in full evening dress. My father the king has told me who you are,' said the young prince indignantly. 'You deceived me last time, but not again. Now I know that those are not real islands and real princesses, because you are a magician.' The man on the shore smiled. It is you who are deceived, my boy. In your father's kingdom there are many islands and many princesses. But you are under your father's spell, so you cannot see them.' The prince pensively returned home. When he saw his father, he looked him in the eyes. Father, is it true that you are not a real king, but only a magician?' The king smiled, and rolled back his sleeves. Yes, my son, I am only a magician.' Then the man on the shore was God.' The man on the shore was another magician.' I must know the real truth, the truth beyond magic.' There is no truth beyond magic,' said the king. The prince was full of sadness. He said, 'I will kill myself.' The king by magic caused death to appear. Death stood in the door and beckoned to the prince. The prince shuddered. He remembered the beautiful but unreal islands and the unreal but beautiful princesses. Very well,' he said. 'I can bear it.' You see, my son,' said the king, 'you too now begin to be a magician.

Because it was all I wanted to fucking know. It was all I wanted to know in this fucking world: where did the beautiful boys go? Where did the beautiful boys go? Where the hell did they go?

Giving cash to a using addict is like handing a loaded gun to someone on the verge of suicide.

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!

Like I said, some people think it’s weird that my best friend is a girl. Sometimes I think it’s weird, too. Mostly people assume that we’re boyfriend and girlfriend, which I guess we could be. But that just seems too teen-movie, if you know what I mean. A boy and girl are best friends, neither of them dates anyone else, and then one night they look at each other and—bang—they realize they’ve been in love with each other the whole time. Everyone’s happy and they go to the big dance together.

Where are the messy women who love the fragile boys. Where are the suicides who are my heroes. Where are the bitches who know what they want, who love what they do, bosomy and declarative, happy to be artistic in this stupid night.

We became acquainted with starry skies the girls had gazed at while camping years before, and the boredom of summers traipsing from back yard to front to back again, and even a certain indefinable smell that arose from toilets on rainy nights, which the girls called "sewery." We knew what it felt like to see a boy with his shirt off, and why it made Lux write the name Kevin in purple Magic Marker all over her three-ring binder and even on her bras and panties, and we understood her rage coming home one day to find that Mrs. Lisbon had soaked her things in Clorox, bleaching all the "Kevins" out. We knew the pain of winter wind rushing up your skirt, and the ache of keeping your knees together in class, and how drab and infuriating it was to jump rope while the boys played baseball. We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why they felt compelled to compliment each other, but sometimes, after one of us had read a long portion of the diary out loud, we had to fight back the urge to hug one another or to tell each other how pretty we were. We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn't fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.

You shouldn't settle for anything less than being in love to the point of madness. The only person that you should be settling for is the person who unsettles you the most. The person who drives you to the brink of suicide because he or she makes you feel so fucking much that you can't catch your breath or remotely function without them. And what's more is you won't want to. You won't want to breathe, or feel, or fucking function without them. That's how you'll know that it's a real relationshop Molloy. Only when you're feeling the most discomfort you've ever felt in your entire life, should you even consider settling. Because that's when you'll know you're in love, which, sounds to me, like a hell of a lot nicer way to live than settling for someone you have nothing in common with because it's comfortable.

You can't screw up your own suicide and then expect the universe to give you presents wrapped in the skin of a wonderful boy. That's just not the way it works.

...sometimes they almost made me feel glad that I had a few extra years to play my depression out with therapy and other means, because I think its useful in youth- unless suicide or drug abuse are the alternatives- to have some faith in the mind to cure itself, to not rush to doctors or diagnosis's...I sometimes worry that part of what creates depression in young people is their own, and their parents, and the whole worlds impatience with allowing the phases of life to run their course. We will very likely soon be living in a society that confuses disease with normal life if the panic and rush to judgment and labeling do not slow down a bit. Somewhere between the unbelievable tardiness that the medical profession was guilty of in administering proper treatment to me and the eagerness to with which practitioners prescribe Ritalin for 8 year old boys and Paxil for 14 year old girls, there is a sane course of action.

Dear bullies, see that young boy you made fun of for crying? Last night his best friend committed suicide. See the girl you called fat? She's starving herself. See the old man you just made fun of cause of the ugly scars? He fought for our country. Post this if you're against bullying. I bet 95% of you won't.

A NOTE TO BULLIES, Dear bullies, that boy you punched in the hall today committed suicide. The boy you called lame has to work every night to support his family. The girl you pushed down the other day, she’s already being abused at home. That girl you called fat, she’s starving herself. The old man you made fun of for his ugly scars, he fought for our country. The boy you made fun of for crying, his mother is dying. You think you know them, but guess what? You don’t. Repost this if you are against bullying. I bet 99% of you won’t. Repost if your that 1% with a heart.

We knew the pain of winter wind rushing up your skirt, and the ache of keeping your knees together in class, and how drab and infuriating it was to jump rope while the boys played baseball. We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why they felt compelled to compliment each other, but sometimes, after one of us had read a long portion of the diary out loud, we had to fight back the urge to hug one another or to tell each other how pretty we were. We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.

Reverend Don Marxhausen disagreed with all the riffs on Satan. He saw two boys with hate in their eyes and assault weapons in their hands. He saw a society that needed to figure out how and why - fast. Blaming Satan was just letting them off easy, he felt, and copping out on our responsibility to investigate. The "end of days" fantasy was even more infuriating.

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.

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 wives Applause, 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 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 wives Swear to shake it up, you swear to listen Swear to shake it up, you swear to listen Swear to shake it up, you swear to listen Swear to shake it up, swear to shake it up 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

Watching her, he saw again how she teetered between adolescence and adulthood, with a raw sensuality that had to deposit her in a kind of no-man's land--too much a woman for boys her own age, too young for fully adult men.

Boys often have permission to become men without the forfeiture of their desirability. And so these men write stories that grasp at girls who are ghosts twice over: first by being dead and second by being shallow shadows of actual girls, the assorted fragments of men's aging imaginations rather than the deep and dimensioned creatures that real girls are.

And then also, again, still, what are those boundaries, if they’re not baselines, that contain and direct its infinite expansion inward, that make tennis like chess on the run, beautiful and infinitely dense? The true opponent, the enfolding boundary, is the player himself. Always and only the self out there, on court, to be met, fought, brought to the table to hammer out terms. The competing boy on the net’s other side: he is not the foe: he is more the partner in the dance. He is the what is the word excuse or occasion for meeting the self. As you are his occasion. Tennis’s beauty’s infinite roots are self-competitive. You compete with your own limits to transcend the self in imagination and execution. Disappear inside the game: break through limits: transcend: improve: win. Which is why tennis is an essentially tragic enterprise… You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place. It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again…Mario thinks hard again. He’s trying to think of how to articulate something like: But then is battling and vanquishing the self the same as destroying yourself? Is that like saying life is pro-death? … And then but so what’s the difference between tennis and suicide, life and death, the game and its own end?

When my reputation was at its height, classmates insulted me right to my face as I walked down the hall. When a teacher called on me, boys snickered and girls rolled their eyes. My body and face burned. I felt mortified. I contemplated suicide.

It's like, when someone asks you how you are and even though you want to say that you feel like shit, that you're miserable, that you cry until you gag and spend most of your time imagining ways to kill yourself, instead you just say, 'Fine, thanks.

It is a big, airy room, the whole floor nearly, with windows that look all ways, and air and sunshine galore. It was nursery first and then playroom and gymnasium, I should judge; for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls. The paint and paper look as if a boys' school had used it. It is stripped off--the paper--in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of the room low down. I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin. It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide--plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions. The color is repellant, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others. No wonder the children hated it! I should hate it myself if I had to live in this room long.

LIA was telling me on a daily basis that a loss of self meant a gain in virtue, and a gain in virtue meant I was drawing closer to God and therefore closer to my true heavenly self. But the means to that end—self-loathing, suicidal ideation, years of false starts—could make you feel lonelier, and less like yourself, than you’d ever felt in your life.

Some people’s self-esteem was secretly improved when they discovered that their then-lovers had killed themselves over them.

It was so sick, I started laughing," she says. "I laughed and cried at the same time. That's when it struck me that I can't take my life as long as I can still laugh.

I'm not gonna kill myself. And we love him very much, which is only half as much as he loves us.

It’s very hard to have a productive dialogue with a thirteen-year-old boy, as every gently broached subject becomes an Ultimate Conversation, requiring defense systems and counterattacks to attacks that were never launched. What begins as an innocent observation about his habit of leaving things in the pockets of dirty clothes ends with Sam blaming his parents for his twenty-eighth-percentile height, which makes him want to commit suicide on YouTube.

What would we happen if we reframed the way we understand black male life in a way that took mental health seriously? If we looked outside and didn't see ruthless gangbangers, but teenage boys left hopeless and giving themselves suicide missions. If instead of chastising young men for fighting over sneakers we asked why they felt worthless and unseen without them. If we didn't label them junkies, but rather recognized their need for affirmation.

Fanfare for the Makers A cloud of witnesses. To whom? To what? To the small fire that never leaves the sky. To the great fire that boils the daily pot. To all the things we are not remembered by, Which we remember and bless. To all the things That will not notice when we die, Yet lend the passing moment words and wings. So fanfare for the Makers: who compose A book of words or deeds who runs may write As many who do run, as a family grows At times like sunflowers turning towards the light. As sometimes in the blackout and the raids One joke composed an island in the night. As sometimes one man’s kindness pervades A room or house or village, as sometimes Merely to tighten screws or sharpen blades Can catch a meaning, as to hear the chimes At midnight means to share them, as one man In old age plants an avenue of limes And before they bloom can smell them, before they span The road can walk beneath the perfected arch, The merest greenprint when the lives began Of those who walk there with him, as in default Of coffee men grind acorns, as in despite Of all assaults conscripts counter assault, As mothers sit up late night after night Moulding a life, as miners day by day Descend blind shafts, as a boy may flaunt his kite In an empty nonchalant sky, as anglers play Their fish, as workers work and can take pride In spending sweat before they draw their pay. As horsemen fashion horses while they ride, As climbers climb a peak because it is there, As life can be confirmed even in suicide: To make is such. Let us make. And set the weather fair. Louis Macneice

Mr. Lisbon knew his parental and neighborly duty entailed putting the retainer in a Ziploc bag, calling the Kriegers, and telling them their expensive orthodontal device was in safe keeping. Acts like theses -- simple, humane, conscientious, forgiving -- held life together. Only a few days earlier he would have been able to perform them. But now he took the retainer and dropped it in the toiler. He pressed the handle. The retainer, jostled int he surge, disappeared down the porcelain throat, and, when waters abated, floated triumphantly, mockingly, out, Mr. Lisbon waited for the tank to refill and flushed again, but the same thing happened. The replica of the boy's mouth clung to the white slope.

Most are desperate boys yearning to salve a deep wound. Insignificance. Worthlessness. Social invisibility. This boy has dreamed and prayed, for so long, of someone loving him, noticing him, above all respecting him. Not that he deserves it. He sure doesn’t respect himself. When hope runs dry, prayers unanswered, a fraction of these boys kill themselves. That ends the pain but doesn’t mend the wound. Suicide confirms their pathetic status. But a thunderstroke, desolation of a community, shock across the country—that rates awe. Respect. He is heralded as a mastermind. Everything he craved.

She was beginning to stir questions in me that I'd spent all my life refusing to ask, since the day I had looked down from the window at the broken body of the schoolboy on the flagstones a long way below, while a master hurried from the cloisters with his black gown flapping in the winter wind, to see what had happened: the day when I was suddenly old enough to understand that I had a choice. I could either do what that other boy had done, or I could spend the rest of my life outside society, where it was safe

God loves everyone. so if you say nobody loves you then i'm calling bullshit Dear bullies, see that boy you made fun of for crying? Last night his best friend committed suicide. See that girl you called fat? She's starving herself. See that old man you made fun of because of the ugly scars? He fought for our country. Post this if you're against bullying. I bet 95% of you won't." —–██—– Put this on —–██—– your Wall ██████—if you’re not —–██—– embarrassed —–██—– to tell others —–██—– that you —–██—– believe in God!

I have a daughter who reminds me too much of what I used to be, full of love and joy, kissing every person she meets because everyone is good and will do her no harm. And that terrifies me to the point to where I can barely function. —KURT COBAIN, in his suicide note

I learned something in the years I spent among suicide bombers. . . The boys and girls who are willing to blow up their lives are not the true believers. They are the ones in agonies of doubt. There is always someone with nothing to prove who buckles the belt around them.

Now standing in one corner of a boxing ring with a .22 caliber Colt automatic pistol, shooting a bullet weighing only 40 grains and with a striking energy of 51 foot pounds at 25 feet from the muzzle, I will guarantee to kill either Gene Tunney or Joe Louis before they get to me from the opposite corner. This is the smallest caliber pistol cartridge made; but it is also one of the most accurate and easy to hit with, since the pistol has no recoil. I have killed many horses with it, cripples and bear baits, with a single shot, and what will kill a horse will kill a man. I have hit six dueling silhouettes in the head with it at regulation distance in five seconds. It was this type of pistol that Millen boys’ colleague, Abe Faber, did all his killings with. Yet this same pistol bullet fired at point blank range will not dent a grizzly’s skull, and to shoot a grizzly with a .22 caliber pistol would simply be one way of committing suicide

That's the real distinction between people: not between those who have secrets and those who don't, but between those who want to know everything and those who don't. This search is a sign of love, I maintain. It's similar with books. Not quite the same, of course (it never is); but similar. If you quite enjoy a writer's work, if you turn the page approvingly yet don't mind being interrupted, then you tend to like that author unthinkingly. Good chap, you assume. Sound fellow. They say he strangled an entire pack of Wolf Cubs and fed their bodies to a school of carp? Oh no, I'm sure he didn't; sound fellow, good chap. But if you love a writer, if you depend upon the drip-feed of his intelligence, if you want to pursue him and find him -- despite edicts to the contrary -- then it's impossible to know too much. You seek the vice as well. A pack of Wolf Cubs, eh? Was that twenty-seven or twenty-eight? And did he have their little scarves sewn up into a patchwork quilt? And is it true that as he ascended the scaffold he quoted from the Book of Jonah? And that he bequeathed his carp pond to the local Boy Scouts? But here's the difference. With a lover, a wife, when you find the worst -- be it infidelity or lack of love, madness or the suicidal spark -- you are almost relieved. Life is as I thought it was; shall we now celebrate this disappointment? With a writer you love, the instinct is to defend. This is what I meant earlier: perhaps love for a writer is the purest, the steadiest form of love. And so your defense comes the more easily. The fact of the matter is, carp are an endangered species, and everyone knows that the only diet they will accept if the winter has been especially harsh and the spring turns wet before St Oursin's Day is that of young minced Wolf Cub. Of course he knew he would hang for the offense, but he also knew that humanity is not an endangered species, and reckoned therefore that twenty-seven (did you say twenty-eight?) Wolf Cubs plus one middle-ranking author (he was always ridiculously modest about his talents) were a trivial price to pay for the survival of an entire breed of fish. Take the long view: did we need so many Wolf Cubs? They would only have grown up and become Boy Scouts. And if you're still so mired in sentimentality, look at it this way: the admission fees so far received from visitors to the carp pond have already enabled the Boy Scouts to build and maintain several church halls in the area.

No, no,” howled Shadow. “Do not keep me here!” “Do you not love the boy?” said the voice of the sea. “Love is terrible!” Shadow howled. “I know,” replied the sea. “It is full of hurt.” “It is. But do you not love the boy?” “I do love the boy!” the dog cried. “You cannot leave the boy in this storm, not if you truly love him,” she said.

Dear lady, ... dear gentleman, reader, [it's] not right ... to put down this writer on his writing ... And I'll tell you why, too: it hurts, that's why.... People try to understand why writers commit suicide by jumping off boats or by alcoholism or by being heroic continuously or by rope or gun or drug or knife or water, and ... I can tell you straight out, ... it is reading slurring remarks about their writing that drives writers to the grave. Dirty remarks passed by ... dirty but damned nicely educated and very highly-paid ladies and gentlemen have the effect of killing writers. Yes, that's right. Dirty words ... in slick paper magazines read by smart people do assassinate writers. ... And boy let me tell you I am all for it, even when by some ... misunderstanding the dirty words are directed to me rather than to the party really deserving them. Accidents happen, dear clever reviewer or critic, and let it not be said that William Saroyan is one not to see a situation from the point of view of the other party, ... and I shall be the first to defend your right to be critical and even sarcastic, knowing full well that it is not about me and my writing, although my name is by mistake taken in vain by you. ... But go on, go on, do your good clever writing, every one of you, I am home, your are home, and we are each of us not yet on Variety's Necrology list, so if we can't take it, who can?

."..Only Tony's things sting me like the wasps stung me." He cocked a finger gravely at his temple, a five-year old boy unconsciously burlesquing suicide.

Living in homes without dads is more correlated with suicide among teenagers than any other factor.16

Men's rights activists tend to make a series of valid observations from which they proceed to a single, 180-degree-wrong conclusion. They are correct to point out that, worldwide, suicide is the most common form of death for men under fifty. It's also true that men are more likely than women to have serious problems with alcohol, that men die younger, that the prison population is 95 per cent male and that the lack of support for our returning frontline soldiers is a national disgrace. So far, so regrettably true. They are incorrect, however, to lay any of this at the door of 'feminism', a term which they use almost interchangeably with 'women'. [...] No, sir. No, lads. No, Daddy. That won't help us and it won't help anyone else. Men in trouble are often in trouble precisely because they are trying to Get a Grip and Act Like a Man. We are at risk of suicide because the alternative is to ask for help, something we have been repeatedly told is unmanly. We are in prison because the traditional breadwinning expectation of manhood can't be met, or the pressure to conform is too great, or the option of violence has been frowned upon but implicitly sanctioned since we were children. [...] We die younger than women because, for one thing, we don't go to the doctor. We don't take ourselves too seriously. We don't want to be thought self-indulgent. The mark of a real man is being able to tolerate a chest infection for three months before laying off the smokes or asking for medicine.

The city continued on its way. Boys tried to sell me drumsticks, girls played hopscotch, the Bihari badly worker carried his gathri of ironed clothes to the homes from which they had come, and the buses honked at suicidal cyclists. At one level this was vaguely confusing. Surely, something should acknowledge how much things had changed? At another level, it was oddly comforting.

Fame requires every kind of excess. I mean true fame, a devouring neon, not the somber renown of waning statesmen or chinless kings. I mean long journeys across gray space. I mean danger, the edge of every void, the circumstance of one man imparting an erotic terror to the dreams of the republic. Understand the man who must inhabit these extreme regions, monstrous and vulval, damp with memories of violation. Even if half-mad he is absorbed into the public's total madness; even if fully rational, a bureaucrat in hell, a secret genius of survival, he is sure to be destroyed by the public's contempt for survivors. Fame, this special kind, feeds itself on outrage, on what the counselors of lesser men would consider bad publicity-hysteria in limousines, knife fights in the audience, bizarre litigation, treachery, pandemonium and drugs. Perhaps the only natural law attaching to true fame is that the famous man is compelled, eventually, to commit suicide. (Is it clear I was a hero of rock'n'roll?) Toward the end of the final tour it became apparent that our audience wanted more than music, more even than its own reduplicated noise. It's possible the culture had reached its limit, a point of severe tension. There was less sense of simple visceral abandon at our concerts during these last weeks. Few cases of arson and vandalism. Fewer still of rape. No smoke bombs or threats of worse explosives. Our followers, in their isolation, were not concerned with precedent now. They were free of old saints and martyrs, but fearfully so, left with their own unlabeled flesh. Those without tickets didn't storm the barricades, and during a performance the boys and girls directly below us, scratching at the stage, were less murderous in their love of me, as if realizing finally that my death, to be authentic, must be self-willed- a succesful piece of instruction only if it occured by my own hand, preferrably ina foreign city. I began to think their education would not be complete until they outdid me as a teacher, until one day they merely pantomimed the kind of massive response the group was used to getting. As we performed they would dance, collapse, clutch each other, wave their arms, all the while making absolutely no sound. We would stand in the incandescent pit of a huge stadium filled with wildly rippling bodies, all totally silent. Our recent music, deprived of people's screams, was next to meaningless, and there would have been no choice but to stop playing. A profound joke it would have been. A lesson in something or other. In Houston I left the group, saying nothing, and boarded a plane for New York City, that contaminated shrine, place of my birth. I knew Azarian would assume leadership of the band, his body being prettiest. As to the rest, I left them to their respective uproars- news media, promotion people, agents, accountants, various members of the managerial peerage. The public would come closer to understanding my disappearance than anyone else. It was not quite as total as the act they needed and nobody could be sure whether I was gone for good. For my closest followers, it foreshadowed a period of waiting. Either I'd return with a new language for them to speak or they'd seek a divine silence attendant to my own. I took a taxi past the cemetaries toward Manhattan, tides of ash-light breaking across the spires. new York seemed older than the cities of Europe, a sadistic gift of the sixteenth century, ever on the verge of plague. The cab driver was young, however, a freckled kid with a moderate orange Afro. I told him to take the tunnel. Is there a tunnel?" he said.

I’ve never been with a boy who hasn’t seen me naked. It’s always the squeaky futon, bear-it-all, turn-off-the-lights quickstep. Don’t chalk it up to “daddy issues.” Maybe I’m sick of keeping private parts private. I don’t want rainwater secrets on my lips, tasting of “don’t make too much noise”. October’s dust in my lungs, maybe I don’t want bits of four AM lingering in my subconscious. Smokers breathe in fire, coat their insides in ash. Is that suicide or arson? Listen to me, listen to me. I’m alive. I’M ALIVE. I’m naked and bruised, but I’m alive. I’m not a piece of fruit. Don’t press into my flesh, looking for soft spots. My whole body is tender and rotten, but I’m alive. I’m alive and just because you can see it all, doesn’t mean you know it all

I pray even as the news in the papers makes my prayers seem insignificant in scale and wholly selfish. There is a devastating hurricane and flooding and suicide bombers and crashes and tsunamis and terrorism and cancer and war—endless and brutal war—disease and famine and earthquakes and everywhere there is addiction, and today the heavens must be overwhelmed with the noise of all the prayers.

On the surface, I was bullied for being effeminate, articulate, overweight, well-read, interested in recreations and matters non-traditional for black boys or even black people--essentially for being myself. To be hounded for merely existing in one's own skin is not unique to blacks, but at least during Jim Crow we could turn to one another. In modern-day terrorism, we turn on one another, with limited options for sanctuary.

Ah, you fool. Dying isn’t sacrifice. Haven’t you figured that out yet? All those years of trying to get yourself killed in battle? That ain’t sacrifice, boy. That’s self-loathing. It’s gleeful suicide. It’s vanity.

I pray even as the news in the papers makes my prayer seem insignificant in scale and wholly selfish. There is a devastating hurricane and flooding and suicide bombers and crashes and tsunamis and terrorism and cancer and war—endless and brutal war—disease and famine and earthquakes and everywhere there is addiction, and today the heavens must be overwhelmed with the noise of all the prayers. Here is one more. Please God heal Nic. Please God heal Nic. The

he saw neither teacher nor students, and was aware only of the heavenly light in the room, an orange glow from the autumnal foliage outside. the room seemed full of a sweet viscous liquid, a honey nearly light as air, which he breathed in.

One of the boys asked if the fences around the camps had been electrified, and then someone else had said how strange it must have been, living in a place like that, where you could commit suicide any time you liked just by touching a fence.

Though the boys never admit it as much, it is crucial the Lisbon sisters are all thin and beautiful within reason. There are a handful of imperfect features among them but nothing that would make the sum of each one's parts less than desirable. In the safety of being attractive, their eccentricities are as precious as their bodies. Their bodies protect all eccentricity from becoming "strange" or "gross" in the way similar predilections are characterized when possessed by heavier or uglier girls.

Astronotların uzayda salınıp yeryüzüne döndükten sonra, burası onlara çürüyen bir et gibi koktuğu için midelerinin kötü olduğunu okumuştum bir yerlerde. Biz diğer insanlar, her gün soluduğumuz için bu iğrenç kokuyu fark etmiyoruz; hava bize normal geliyor, ama aslında içine saldığımız bir sürü çöp, kimyasal ve kirletici maddeyle dolu. Sonra, dünya birinin eski arabasıymış da, dikiz aynasına büyük boy bir çam kokusu asıyormuşuz gibi etrafa başka saçmalıklar sıkıp havanın daha iyi kokmasını sağlamaya çalışıyoruz.

He stood over her for as long as he could endure the cold, long enough for the boy tending the dead to pass twice on fingertips and toes. The boy's self-appointed mission was to keep all of their eyes closed, the dead. Otherwise he couldn't sleep, the boy. But he never did anyway, as far as the Agent could tell. Any hour, there he'd be, scuttling from body to body under his calf robe. Many nights when the Agent locked his door, it wasn't to keep the Piegan from stealing his tins and blankets, but to keep the boy's hands from covering his own eyes.

But now whenever he comes he shows me bad things. Awful things. Like in the bathroom last night. The things he shows me, they sting me like those wasps stung me. Only Tony’s things sting me up here.” He cocked a finger gravely at his temple, a small boy unconsciously burlesquing suicide.

It was a very touch- and- go business, in 1955, to get a wholly plausible reading from Mrs. Glass’s face, and especially from her enormous blue eyes. Where once, a few years earlier, her eyes alone could break the news (either to people or to bathmats) that two of her sons were dead, one by suicide (her favorite, her most intricately calibrated, her kindest son) and one killed in World Ward II (her only truly lighthearted son)- where once Bessie Glass’s eyes alone could report these facts, with an eloquence and a seeming passion for detail that neither her husband nor any of her adult surviving children could bear to look at, let alone take in, now, in 1955, she was apt to use this same terrible Celtic equipment to break the news, usually at the front door, that the new delivery boy hadn’t brought the leg of lamb in time for dinner or that some remote Hollywood starlet’s marriage was on the rocks.

No, no,” howled Shadow. “Do not keep me here!” “Do you not love the boy?” said the voice of the sea. “Love is terrible!” Shadow howled. “I know,” replied the sea. “It is full of hurt.” “It is. But do you not love the boy?” “I do love the boy!” the dog cried. “You cannot leave the boy in this storm, not if you truly love him,” she said.

These women do not stop to ponder the consequences of their claims to be playing with the boys. They do not consider the full male experience, but cosplay the particular parts the system wants them to play. She works hard for the corporation. She has meaningless sex. She acts tough. She isn't afraid to fight. She then wonders why women are depressed more, committing suicide more often, and why one in four are on mental medication. Playing at just a few parts of the male role drives women to medication, drinking, and despair. It is womans ignorance of masculinity that they would ever dare to claim she was performing a father's role. No man would claim to do a mother's role, for he knows he could never be a mother. A dog may jump around and act like a cat, but it is still a dog.

I freeze, my feet suddenly glued to the floor. It takes me a minute to gather the courage to turn around, but when I do, I immediately wish I hadn't. The boy is standing in the doorway at the end of the hall. Why is he here again? I barely allow myself time to ask the question before I move. Panicked, I turn and run back downstairs as fast as I can. "Hey! Wait!" he calls after me. I don't stop.

In the West, we are perilously getting down to our last man. Liberal democracy, among us, is achieving the goal that Fukuyama predicted for it: It is eliminating the alpha males from our midst, and at a dizzyingly accelerating rate. But in Muslim societies, the alpha male is still alive and well. While we in America are drugging our alpha boys with Ritalin, the Muslims are doing everything in their power to encourage their alpha boys to be tough, aggressive, and ruthless…. We are proud if our sons get into a good college; they are proud if their sons die as martyrs. To rid your society of high-testosterone alpha males may bring peace and quiet; but if you have an enemy that is building up an army of alpha boys to hate you fanatically and who have vowed to destroy you, you will be committing suicide….

Almost more common is the sensitive boy who learns in school to encrust himself for life in the shell of the “tough-guy” attitude. As an adult he plays, in self-defense, the role of the Philistine, to whom all intellectual and emotional culture is womanish and “sissy.” Carried to its final extreme, the logical end of this type of reaction to life is suicide. The hard-bitten kind of person is always, as it were, a partial suicide; some of himself is already dead.

My childhood wasn’t a movie, of course, though it did have chase sequences, fight scenes, shoot-outs, skyjacking, life and death suspense, and suicide. The plot didn’t make much sense to me as a boy, but it does now. It turns out I was attending an academy of sorts, and though hopefully on different subjects, so were you. No matter what your major, you too have been studying people for a long time, carefully developing theories and strategies to predict what they might do.

The thing people don’t tell you about suicide attempts? They don’t tell you about the fucking flinch. That moment when the blood is pouring from your wrists, or you’re drifting into oblivion, and you should feel peace. You should feel happiness, knowing the end is coming. So close, you can taste it. Feel it. Almost sink right into it. They don’t tell you that is the exact moment you fucking regret it. The exact moment you want to die because you don’t want to fucking die. You want to kill yourself because you were so fucking stupid.

I was already an atheist, and by my senior year I had became obsessed with the question “What is the meaning of life?” I wrote my personal statement for college admissions on the meaninglessness of life. I spent the winter of my senior year in a kind of philosophical depression—not a clinical depression, just a pervasive sense that everything was pointless. In the grand scheme of things, I thought, it really didn’t matter whether I got into college, or whether the Earth was destroyed by an asteroid or by nuclear war. My despair was particularly strange because, for the first time since the age of four, my life was perfect. I had a wonderful girlfriend, great friends, and loving parents. I was captain of the track team, and, perhaps most important for a seventeen-year-old boy, I got to drive around in my father’s 1966 Thunderbird convertible. Yet I kept wondering why any of it mattered. Like the author of Ecclesiastes, I thought that “all is vanity and a chasing after wind” (ECCLESIASTES 1:14) . I finally escaped when, after a week of thinking about suicide (in the abstract, not as a plan), I turned the problem inside out. There is no God and no externally given meaning to life, I thought, so from one perspective it really wouldn’t matter if I killed myself tomorrow. Very well, then everything beyond tomorrow is a gift with no strings and no expectations. There is no test to hand in at the end of life, so there is no way to fail. If this really is all there is, why not embrace it, rather than throw it away? I don’t know whether this realization lifted my mood or whether an improving mood helped me to reframe the problem with hope; but my existential depression lifted and I enjoyed the last months of high school.

O Tell Me The Truth About Love - Poem by WH Auden Some say love's a little boy, And some say it's a bird, Some say it makes the world go round, Some say that's absurd, And when I asked the man next door, Who looked as if he knew, His wife got very cross indeed, And said it wouldn't do. Does it look like a pair of pyjamas, Or the ham in a temperance hotel? Does its odour remind one of llamas, Or has it a comforting smell? Is it prickly to touch as a hedge is, Or soft as eiderdown fluff? Is it sharp or quite smooth at the edges? O tell me the truth about love. Our history books refer to it In cryptic little notes, It's quite a common topic on The Transatlantic boats; I've found the subject mentioned in Accounts of suicides, And even seen it scribbled on The backs of railway guides. Does it howl like a hungry Alsatian, Or boom like a military band? Could one give a first-rate imitation On a saw or a Steinway Grand? Is its singing at parties a riot? Does it only like Classical stuff? Will it stop when one wants to be quiet? O tell me the truth about love. I looked inside the summer-house; It wasn't even there; I tried the Thames at Maidenhead, And Brighton's bracing air. I don't know what the blackbird sang, Or what the tulip said; But it wasn't in the chicken-run, Or underneath the bed. Can it pull extraordinary faces? Is it usually sick on a swing? Does it spend all its time at the races, or fiddling with pieces of string? Has it views of its own about money? Does it think Patriotism enough? Are its stories vulgar but funny? O tell me the truth about love. When it comes, will it come without warning Just as I'm picking my nose? Will it knock on my door in the morning, Or tread in the bus on my toes? Will it come like a change in the weather? Will its greeting be courteous or rough? Will it alter my life altogether? O tell me the truth about love.

Has he invited you to dinner, dear? Gifts, flowers, the usual?” I had to put my cup down, because my hand was shaking too much. When I stopped laughing, I said, “Curran? He isn’t exactly Mr. Smooth. He handed me a bowl of soup, that’s as far as we got.” “He fed you?” Raphael stopped rubbing Andrea. “How did this happen?” Aunt B stared at me. “Be very specific, this is important.” “He didn’t actually feed me. I was injured and he handed me a bowl of chicken soup. Actually I think he handed me two or three. And he called me an idiot.” “Did you accept?” Aunt B asked. “Yes, I was starving. Why are the three of you looking at me like that?” “For crying out loud.” Andrea set her cup down, spilling some tea. “The Beast Lord’s feeding you soup. Think about that for a second.” Raphael coughed. Aunt B leaned forward. “Was there anybody else in the room?” “No. He chased everyone out.” Raphael nodded. “At least he hasn’t gone public yet.” “He might never,” Andrea said. “It would jeopardize her position with the Order.” Aunt B’s face was grave. “It doesn’t go past this room. You hear me, Raphael? No gossip, no pillow talk, not a word. We don’t want any trouble with Curran.” “If you don’t explain it all to me, I will strangle somebody.” Of course, Raphael might like that . . . “Food has a special significance,” Aunt D said. I nodded. “Food indicates hierarchy. Nobody eats before the alpha, unless permission is given, and no alpha eats in Curran’s presence until Curran takes a bite.” “There is more,” Aunt B said. “Animals express love through food. When a cat loves you, he’ll leave dead mice on your porch, because you’re a lousy hunter and he wants to take care of you. When a shapeshifter boy likes a girl, he’ll bring her food and if she likes him back, she might make him lunch. When Curran wants to show interest in a woman, he buys her dinner.” “In public,” Raphael added, “the shapeshifter fathers always put the first bite on the plates of their wives and children. It signals that if someone wants to challenge the wife or the child, they would have to challenge the male first.” “If you put all of Curran’s girls together, you could have a parade,” Aunt B said. “But I’ve never seen him physically put food into a woman’s hands. He’s a very private man, so he might have done it in an intimate moment, but I would’ve found out eventually. Something like that doesn’t stay hidden in the Keep. Do you understand now? That’s a sign of a very serious interest, dear.” “But I didn’t know what it meant!” Aunt B frowned. “Doesn’t matter. You need to be very careful right now. When Curran wants something, he doesn’t become distracted. He goes after it and he doesn’t stop until he obtains his goal no matter what it takes. That tenacity is what makes him an alpha.” “You’re scaring me.” “Scared might be too strong a word, but in your place, I would definitely be concerned.” I wished I were back home, where I could get to my bottle of sangria. This clearly counted as a dire emergency. As if reading my thoughts, Aunt B rose, took a small bottle from a cabinet, and poured me a shot. I took it, and drained it in one gulp, letting tequila slide down my throat like liquid fire. “Feel better?” “It helped.” Curran had driven me to drinking. At least I wasn’t contemplating suicide.

Who was the Ghost?" "Her cousin Freddy, He'd hung himself in the summer. He was fifteen. They were really close Freddy & Sheryll." "What did he want?" 'He said there was pictures in his family's barn of guys in their underwear. He told us right where to find them, hidden under a floorboard. He said he didn't want his parents to know he was gay and be anymore upset than they were. He said that's why he killed himself, because he didn't want to be gay anymore. Then he said, 'souls aren't boys and aren't girls. They're only souls. He said there is no gay and he had made is mama sorrowful for nothin'. I remember that exactly. That he used the word sorrowful.

Let us pause briefly to tally the grim catalog of disasters that had befallen these two boys between 1765 and 1769: their father had vanished, their mother had died, their cousin and supposed protector had committed bloody suicide, and their aunt, uncle, and grandmother had all died. James, sixteen, and Alexander, fourteen, were now left alone, largely friendless and penniless. At every step in their rootless, topsy-turvy existence, they had been surrounded by failed, broken, embittered people. Their short lives had been shadowed by a stupefying sequence of bankruptcies, marital separations, deaths, scandals, and disinheritance. Such repeated shocks must have stripped Alexander Hamilton of any sense that life was fair, that he existed in a benign universe, or that he could ever count on help from anyone. That this abominable childhood produced such a strong, productive, self-reliant human being—that this fatherless adolescent could have ended up a founding father of a country he had not yet even seen—seems little short of miraculous. Because he maintained perfect silence about his unspeakable past, never exploiting it to puff his later success, it was impossible for his contemporaries to comprehend the exceptional nature of his personal triumph. What we know of Hamilton’s childhood has been learned almost entirely during the past century.

And this was perhaps the first time in my life that death occurred to me as a reality. I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it — it, the physical act. I had thought of suicide when I was much younger, as, possibly, we all have, but then it would have been for revenge, it would have been my way of informing the world how awfully it had made me suffer. But the silence of the evening, as I wandered home, had nothing to do with that storm, that far-off boy. I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.

Your father says the boy lost his mother,” she said. She was washing lettuce in the sink and shouting above the water. “No, not quite. She made a suicide attempt, but she’s okay.” Marta shook her head. “Oh, they always succeed sooner or later. How hard can it be? This is a crazy country, that people want to kill themselves. Other countries, people struggle to stay alive every day, they run between the bullets, they eat five little pieces of rice, and here the people say, Oh, stay alive in this beautiful country with lots to eat? No thank you, not for me.” I was sure there were plenty of suicides back in the country that invented Russian roulette, but now was not the time to say

Jordan Peterson, a Canadian clinical psychologist and author, dubbed the new guidelines ‘reprehensible, infuriating and disheartening’, claiming that the APA was dominated by ‘political types’ and ‘hard-left leaning political activists’.27 AVFM described it as a ‘war on masculinity’, calling the APA ‘armed combatants in the war of ideas’. Their objection? That the guidelines acknowledged men as beneficiaries of privilege within a patriarchal society and suggested that certain forms of masculinity were harmful. But what they seemed to miss entirely was that that harm is damaging men and boys, not just women and girls. The male suicide rate is one of the genuine areas of serious concern most commonly cited by MRAs.

On Lou's lips a trace of pinot and out of them poured tales of acts of viciousness worthy of the great Lucifer himself, stories told through the night, the tortures, the beatings, the broken bones, every school has its Tigellinus, but his had more than one and each with followers, all-American boys who delighted in discovering how much pain a soul could withstand, two suicide attempts and all his parents and school could do was try to make Lou change his behavior, his behavior, his behavior, his, his, his, to modify his being just a bit. It gets better, Doc, fucking gets better, no one dared suggest that maybe the family and the school should change, or heaven forbid, that it was the all-Americans who should be modifying their beings, no, the homo should grin and bear it dumbly...

In Diyala, east of Baghdad, in the early days of the war, I came upon a group of American marines standing next to a shot-up bus and a line of six Iraqi corpses. Omar, a fifteen-year-old boy, sat on the roadside weeping, drenched in the blood of his father, who had been shot dead by American marines when he ran a roadblock. “What could we have done?” one of the marines muttered. It had been dark, there were suicide bombers about and that same night the marines had found a cache of weapons stowed on a truck. They were under orders to stop every car. The minibus, they said, kept coming anyway. They fired four warning shots, tracer rounds, just to make sure there was no misunderstanding. Omar’s family, ten in all, were driving together to get out of the fighting in Baghdad. They claimed they had stopped in time, just as the marines had asked them to. In the confusion, the truth was elusive, but it seemed possible that Omar’s family had not understood. “We yelled at them to stop,” Corporal Eric Jewell told me. “Everybody knows the word ‘stop.’ It’s universal.” In all, six members of Omar’s family were dead, covered by blankets on the roadside. Among them were Omar’s father, mother, brother and sister. A two-year-old boy, Ali, had been shot in the face. “My whole family is dead,” muttered Aleya, one of the survivors, careening between hysteria and grief. “How can I grieve for so many people?” The marines had been keeping up a strong front when I arrived, trying to stay business-like about the incident. “Better them than us,” one of them said. The marines volunteered to help lift the bodies onto a flatbed truck. One of the dead had already been partially buried, so the young marines helped dig up the corpse and lift it onto the vehicle. Then one of the marines began to cry.   I

In the West, we are perilously getting down to our last man. Liberal democracy, among us, is achieving the goal that Fukuyama predicted for it: It is eliminating the alpha males from our midst, and at a dizzyingly accelerating rate. But in Muslim societies, the alpha male is still alive and well. While we in America are drugging our alpha boys with Ritalin, the Muslims are doing everything in their power to encourage their alpha boys to be tough, aggressive, and ruthless…. We are proud if our sons get into a good college; they are proud if their sons die as martyrs. To rid your society of high-testosterone alpha males may bring peace and quiet; but if you have an enemy that is building up an army of alpha boys to hate you fanatically and who have vowed to destroy you, you will be committing suicide…. The end of testosterone in the West alone will not culminate in the end of history, but it may well culminate in the end of the West.

Barbara brings her chair close to mine. She says that, to the outside world, suicide could seem a rational choice for someone like her or me. After all, our shared diagnosis is terminal in many cases. “Anybody else contemplating suicide would receive intervention, because they’re assumed to be depressed and treatable. But you and me . . . ? Society is too quick to allow cripples to off themselves,” she says. In fact, society sometimes seems to encourage disabled people to get out of the way, stop being a burden or stop using up scarce resources, she goes on. It can push disabled people to the margins, where they naturally become depressed. And instead of identifying their depression as treatable—instead of creating opportunities that make their lives worth living—society (she calls it “the majority culture”) wants to push for the right to die before it’s established the right to live. “You know about Jack Kevorkian, right?” she asks.

One's prescription can seem extensive--even overwhelming, depending on an individual's circumstance--and I can imagine the prospects exciting few people of any stripe. Lots of eaters are going to balk at abstaining, but to learn that recovery is going to require rigorous honesty, or more attention to spirit, could be far more off-putting. Then again, who gets excited about any serious treatment prescription? Certainly not the cancer patient told she'll have to undergo radiation, or the back patient ordered to a month's uninterrupted bed rest, or the lung patient told he'll need a double transplant. To some, the flaw of those comparisons will be their being equated with food addiction, and that is the rub, entirely. The medical profession and the public at large don't see that they are equivalent. The consequences of obesity (the chief consequence of food addiction) constitute the fastest-growing, and soon the gravest, threat to public health. Obesity is suicide on lay-away: It has plenty of time to degrade quality of life before finally ending life prematurely.

The older a woman got, the more diligent she had to become about not burdening men with the gory details of her past, lest she scare them off. That was the name of the game: Don’t Scare the Men. Those who encouraged you to indulge in your impulse to share, largely did so to expedite a bus. Like I felt the wind of the bus. I could even see a couple of the passengers, all shaken by a potential suicide. And out of nowhere, the guy rushes over, yanks me toward him, and escorts me out of the street.” “The birthday boy?” “No, different guy. You all start to look the same after a while, you know that? Anyway, we were both so high on adrenaline, we couldn’t stop laughing the whole night. Then he asked me out. Now one of our jokes is about that time I flung myself into traffic to avoid him.” “You were in shock.” “No, I wasn’t.” “Why isn’t the joke that he saved your life?” “I don’t know, Amos,” I said, folding my fingers together. “Maybe we’re both waiting for the day I turn around and say, ‘That’s right, asshole, I did fling myself into traffic to avoid you.’ I’m joking.” “Are you?” “Am I?” I mimicked him. “Should the day come when you manage to face-plant yourself into a relationship, you’ll find there are certain fragile truths every couple has. Sometimes I’m uncomfortable with the power, knowing I could break us up if I wanted. Other times, I want to blow it up just because it’s there. But then the feeling passes.” “That’s bleak.” “To you, it is. But I’m not like you. I don’t need to escape every room I’m in.” “But you are like me. You think you want monogamy, but you probably don’t if you dated me.” “You’re faulting me for liking you now?” “All I’m saying is you can’t just will yourself into being satisfied with this guy.” “Watch me,” I said, trying to burn a hole in his face. “If it were me, the party would have been our first date and it never would have ended.” “Oh, yes it would have,” I said, laughing. “The date would have lasted one week, but the whole relationship would have lasted one month.” “Yeah,” he said, “you’re right.” “I know I’m right.” “It wouldn’t have lasted.” “This is what I’m saying.” “Because if I were this dude, I would have left you by now.” Before I could say anything, Amos excused himself to pee. On the bathroom door was a black and gold sticker in the shape of a man. I felt a rage rise up all the way to my eyeballs, thinking of how naturally Amos associated himself with that sticker, thinking of him aligning himself with every powerful, brilliant, thoughtful man who has gone through that door as well as every stupid, entitled, and cruel one, effortlessly merging with a class of people for whom the world was built. I took my phone out, opening the virtual cuckoo clocks, trying to be somewhere else. I was confronted with a slideshow of a female friend’s dead houseplants, meant to symbolize inadequacy within reason. Amos didn’t have a clue what it was like to be a woman in New York, unsure if she’s with the right person. Even if I did want to up and leave Boots, dating was not a taste I’d acquired. The older a woman got, the more diligent she had to become about not burdening men with the gory details of her past, lest she scare them off. That was the name of the game: Don’t Scare the Men. Those who encouraged you to indulge in your impulse to share, largely did so to expedite a decision. They knew they were on trial too, but our courtrooms had more lenient judges.

The Process of Explication" I Students, look at this table And now when you see a man six feet tall You can call him a fathom. Likewise, students when yes and you do that and other stuff Likewise too the shoe falls upon the sun And the alphabet is full of blood And when you knock upon a sentence in the Process of explication you are going to need a lot of rags Likewise, hello and goodbye. II Nick Algiers is my student And he sits there in a heap in front of me thinking of suicide And so, I am the one in front of him And I dance around him in a circle and light him on fire And with his face on fire, I am suddenly ashamed. Likewise the distance between us then Is the knife that is not marriage. III Students, I can’t lie, I’d rather be doing something else, I guess Like making love or writing a poem Or drinking wine on a tropical island With a handsome boy who wants to hold me all night. I can’t lie that dreams are ridiculous. And in dreaming myself upon the moon I have made the moon my home and no one Can ever get to me to hit me or kiss my lips. And as my bridegroom comes and takes me away from you You all ask me what is wrong and I say it is That I will never win.

Once upon a time, there were two youngsters, a boy and a girl. Their families hated each other. But the boy snuck into a party hosted by the girl’s family because he was kind of a dick. The girl sees the boy, and angels sing so sweetly to her lady-parts that she instantly falls in love with him. Just like that. And so he sneaks into her garden and they decide to get married the next freaking day, because, you know, that’s totally practical, especially when your parents want to murder each other. Jump ahead a few days. Their families find out about the marriage and throw a shit-fit. Mercutio dies. The girl is so upset that she drinks a potion that will put her to sleep for two days. But, unfortunately, the young couple hasn’t learned the ins and outs of good marital communication yet, and the young girl totally forgets to mention something about it to her new husband. The young man therefore mistakes his new wife’s self-induced coma for suicide. He then totally loses his marbles and he commits suicide, thinking he’s going to be with her in the afterlife or some shit. But then she wakes up from her two-day coma, only to learn that her new husband has committed suicide, so she has the exact same idea and kills herself too. The end. Romeo

Mrs. Glass, who had resumed staring at the blue bathmat, gave an absent-minded nod at this ‘fair warning.’ And at that instant, more than just mentionably, had Zooey seen her face, and particularly her eyes, he might have had a strong impulse, passing or not, to recall, or reconstruct, or reinflect the greater part of his share of the conversation that had passed between them--to temper it, to soften it. On the other hand, he might not have. It was a very touch-and-go business, in 1955, to get a wholly plausible reading from Mrs. Glass's face, and especially from her enormous blue eyes. Where once, a few years earlier, her eyes alone could break the news (either to people or to bathmats) that two of her sons were dead, one by suicide (her favorite, her most intricately calibrated, her kindest son), and one killed in World War II (her only truly lighthearted son)--where once Bessie Glass's eyes alone could report these facts, with an eloquence and a seeming passion for detail that neither her husband nor any of her adult surviving children could bear to look at, let alone take in, now, in 1955, she was apt to use this same terrible Celtic equipment to break the news, usually at the front door, that the new delivery boy hadn't brought the leg of lamb in time for dinner or that some remote Hollywood starlet's marriage was on the rocks.

Rider's head snapped up at the sound of gravel crunching under Willow's boots. The sight of the girl in boy's garb birthed an oath. Beneath her cotton shirt, her breasts bounced freely with each step. And within the tight mannish pants, her hips swung in an unconscious rhythm, clearly proclaiming her all woman. Hell, she might as well be naked! His body's reaction was immediate. Cursing his lack of control, he turned sideways, facing her horse, and pretended to adjust the saddle straps. Willow took Sugar's reins and waited for Rider to move aside. He didn't budge an inch. Instead, he tipped his hat back on his head, revealing undisguised disapproval. "Is that the way you always dress?" he bit out. Willow stiffened, immediately defensive. Criticizing herself was one thing; putting up with Sinclair's disdain was another! "If you were expecting a dress, you're crazy!" she snapped. "It would be suicide in this country." "Haven't you ever heard of riding skirts?" "Yes. I'm not as dumb as you seem to think. But fancy riding skirts cost money I don't have. 'Sides, pants are a hell of a lot more useful on the ranch than some damn riding skirt! Now, if you're done jawing about my clothes, I'd like to get a move on before dark." "Somebody ought to wash that barnyard mouth of yours,woman." Willow rested her hand on her gun. "You can try, if you dare." As if I'd draw on a woman, Rider cursed silently, stepping out of her way. As she hoisted herself into the saddle, he was perversely captivated by the way the faded demin stretched over her round bottom. He imagined her long slender legs wrapped around him and how her perfect heart-shaped buttocks would fill his hands and...Oh,hell, what was he doing standing here, gaping like some callow youth? Maybe the girl was right.Maybe he was crazy. One moment he was giving the little witch hell for wearing men's pants; the next he was ogling her in them. He started to turn away, then reached out and gave her booted ankle an angry jerk. "Now what?" Icy turquoise eyes met his, dark and searing. "Do you have any idea what you look like in that get-up? No self-respecting lady would dress like that. It's an open invitation to a man. And if you think that gun you're wearing is going to protect you, you're badly mistaken." Willow gritted her teeth in mounting ire. "So what's it to you, Sinclair? You ain't my pa and you ain't my brother. Hell,my clothes cover me just as good as yours cover you!" She slapped his hand from her ankle, jerked Sugar around, and spurred the mare into a brisk gallop. Before the fine red dust settled, Rider was on his horse, racing after her. Dammit, she's right.Why should I care how she dresses? Heaven knows it certainly has no bearing on my mission. No, agreed a little voice in his head, but it sure is distacting as hell! He'd always prided himself on his cool control; it had saved his backside more than once. But staying in any kind of control around Willow Vaughn was like trying to tame a whimsical March wind-impossible!

among the young, a portent of the world’s future. Hate crimes, violence against women, and the victimization of children are all in long-term decline, as is the exploitation of children for their labor. As people are getting healthier, richer, safer, and freer, they are also becoming more literate, knowledgeable, and smarter. Early in the 19th century, 12 percent of the world could read and write; today 83 percent can. Literacy and the education it enables will soon be universal, for girls as well as boys. The schooling, together with health and wealth, are literally making us smarter—by thirty IQ points, or two standard deviations above our ancestors. People are putting their longer, healthier, safer, freer, richer, and wiser lives to good use. Americans work 22 fewer hours a week than they used to, have three weeks of paid vacation, lose 43 fewer hours to housework, and spend just a third of their paycheck on necessities rather than five-eighths. They are using their leisure and disposable income to travel, spend time with their children, connect with loved ones, and sample the world’s cuisine, knowledge, and culture. As a result of these gifts, people worldwide have become happier. Even Americans, who take their good fortune for granted, are “pretty happy” or happier, and the younger generations are becoming less unhappy, lonely, depressed, drug-addicted, and suicidal. As societies have become healthier, wealthier, freer, happier, and better educated, they have set their sights on the most pressing global challenges. They have emitted fewer pollutants, cleared fewer forests, spilled less oil,

[Nero] castrated the boy Sporus and actually tried to make a woman of him; and he married him with all the usual ceremonies, including a dowry and a bridal veil, took him to his house attended by a great throng, and treated him as his wife. This Sporus, decked out with the finery of the empresses and riding in a litter, he took with him to the assizes and marts of Greece, and later at Rome through the Street of the Images,​ fondly kissing him from time to time. That he even desired illicit relations with his own mother, and was kept from it by her enemies, who feared that such a help might give the reckless and insolent woman too great influence, was notorious, especially after he added to his concubines a courtesan who was said to look very like Agrippina. Even before that, so they say, whenever he rode in a litter with his mother, he had incestuous relations with her, which were betrayed by the stains on his clothing. He so prostituted his own chastity that after defiling almost every part of his body, he at last devised a kind of game, in which, covered with the skin of some wild animal, he was let loose from a cage and attacked the private parts of men and women, who were bound to stakes, and when he had sated his mad lust, was dispatched​ by his freedman Doryphorus; for he was even married to this man in the same way that he himself had married Sporus, going so far as to imitate the cries and lamentations of a maiden being deflowered. He made a palace extending all the way from the Palatine to the Esquiline, which at first he called the House of Passage, but when it was burned shortly after its completion and rebuilt, the Golden House. Its size and splendour will be sufficiently indicated by the following details. Its vestibule was large enough to contain a colossal statue of the emperor a hundred and twenty feet high; and it was so extensive that it had a triple colonnade​ a mile long. There was a pond too, like a sea, surrounded with buildings to represent cities,​ besides tracts of country, varied by tilled fields, vineyards, pastures and woods, with great numbers of wild and domestic animals. In the rest of the house all parts were overlaid with gold and adorned with gems and mother-of‑pearl. There were dining-rooms with fretted ceils of ivory, whose panels could turn and shower down flowers and were fitted with pipes for sprinkling the guests with perfumes. The main banquet hall was circular and constantly revolved day and night, like the heavens. His mother offended him by too strict surveillance and criticism of his words and acts. At last terrified by her violence and threats, he determined to have her life, and after thrice attempting it by poison and finding that she had made herself immune by antidotes, he tampered with the ceiling of her bedroom, contriving a mechanical device for loosening its panels and dropping them upon her while she slept. When this leaked out through some of those connected with the plot, he devised a collapsible boat,​ to destroy her by shipwreck or by the falling in of its cabin. ...[He] offered her his contrivance, escorting her to it in high spirits and even kissing her breasts as they parted. The rest of the night he passed sleepless in intense anxiety, awaiting the outcome of his design. On learning that everything had gone wrong and that she had escaped by swimming, driven to desperation he secretly had a dagger thrown down beside her freedman Lucius Agermus, when he joyfully brought word that she was safe and sound, and then ordered that the freedman be seized and bound, on the charge of being hired to kill the emperor; that his mother be put to death, and the pretence made that she had escaped the consequences of her detected guilt by suicide.