Suicide Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Suicide. Here they are! All 100 of them:

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I didn't want to wake up. I was having a much better time asleep. And that's really sad. It was almost like a reverse nightmare, like when you wake up from a nightmare you're so relieved. I woke up into a nightmare.
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Ned Vizzini (It's Kind of a Funny Story)
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Did you really want to die?" "No one commits suicide because they want to die." "Then why do they do it?" "Because they want to stop the pain.
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Tiffanie DeBartolo (How to Kill a Rock Star)
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The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night.
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Friedrich Nietzsche
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But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.
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Albert Camus
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there is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock. people so tired mutilated either by love or no love. people just are not good to each other one on one. the rich are not good to the rich the poor are not good to the poor. we are afraid. our educational system tells us that we can all be big-ass winners. it hasn't told us about the gutters or the suicides. or the terror of one person aching in one place alone untouched unspoken to watering a plant.
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Charles Bukowski (Love Is a Dog from Hell)
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I am constantly torn between killing myself and killing everyone around me.
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David Levithan (Will Grayson, Will Grayson)
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A lot of you cared, just not enough.
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Jay Asher (Thirteen Reasons Why)
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...and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?
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Vincent van Gogh
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I can't eat and I can't sleep. I'm not doing well in terms of being a functional human, you know?
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Ned Vizzini (It's Kind of a Funny Story)
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Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.
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Seneca
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I've never been lonely. I've been in a room -- I've felt suicidal. I've been depressed. I've felt awful -- awful beyond all -- but I never felt that one other person could enter that room and cure what was bothering me...or that any number of people could enter that room. In other words, loneliness is something I've never been bothered with because I've always had this terrible itch for solitude. It's being at a party, or at a stadium full of people cheering for something, that I might feel loneliness. I'll quote Ibsen, "The strongest men are the most alone." I've never thought, "Well, some beautiful blonde will come in here and give me a fuck-job, rub my balls, and I'll feel good." No, that won't help. You know the typical crowd, "Wow, it's Friday night, what are you going to do? Just sit there?" Well, yeah. Because there's nothing out there. It's stupidity. Stupid people mingling with stupid people. Let them stupidify themselves. I've never been bothered with the need to rush out into the night. I hid in bars, because I didn't want to hide in factories. That's all. Sorry for all the millions, but I've never been lonely. I like myself. I'm the best form of entertainment I have. Let's drink more wine!
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Charles Bukowski
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The only difference between a suicide and a martyrdom really is the amount of press coverage.
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Chuck Palahniuk (Survivor)
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RΓ©sumΓ© Razors pain you, Rivers are damp, Acids stain you, And drugs cause cramp. Guns aren't lawful, Nooses give, Gas smells awful. You might as well live.
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Dorothy Parker (Enough Rope)
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I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.
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Franz Kafka
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Heart always wins out over the mind. The heart, although reckless and suicidal and a masochist all on its own, always gets its way.
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J.A. Redmerski (The Edge of Never (The Edge of Never, #1))
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Suicide is man's way of telling God, 'You can't fire me - I quit!
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Bill Maher
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The world says: "You have needs -- satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don't hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more." This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.
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Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)
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I waste at least an hour every day lying in bed. Then I waste time pacing. I waste time thinking. I waste time being quiet and not saying anything because I'm afraid I'll stutter.
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Ned Vizzini (It's Kind of a Funny Story)
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A book is a suicide postponed.
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Emil M. Cioran
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Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?
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Emil M. Cioran
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There comes a time when you look into the mirror and you realize that what you see is all that you will ever be. And then you accept it. Or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking in mirrors.
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J. Michael Straczynski (Babylon 5: The Scripts of J. Michael Straczynski, Vol. 2)
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I'm the girl nobody knows until she commits suicide. Then suddenly everyone had a class with her.
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Tom Leveen (Party)
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and he suddenly knew that if she killed herself, he would die. Maybe not immediately, maybe not with the same blinding rush of pain, but it would happen. You couldn't live for very long without a heart.
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Jodi Picoult
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If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide.
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Mahatma Gandhi
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She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about.
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Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)
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Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same. It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you're allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It's like killing yourself, and then you're reborn. I guess I've lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now.
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Charles Bukowski
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Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly
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Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)
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Killing oneself is, anyway, a misnomer. We don't kill ourselves. We are simply defeated by the long, hard struggle to stay alive. When somebody dies after a long illness, people are apt to say, with a note of approval, "He fought so hard." And they are inclined to think, about a suicide, that no fight was involved, that somebody simply gave up. This is quite wrong.
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Sally Brampton (Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression)
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Nothing in my life has ever made me want to commit suicide more than people's reaction to my trying to commit suicide.
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Emilie Autumn (The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls)
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People rarely bring flowers to a suicide.
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Jennifer Niven (All the Bright Places)
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Envy is ignorance, Imitation is Suicide.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson (Self-Reliance)
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Everything...affects everything
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Jay Asher (Thirteen Reasons Why)
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For never was a story of more woe than this of Juliet and her Romeo.
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William Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet)
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I went to the worst of bars hoping to get killed but all I could do was to get drunk again.
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Charles Bukowski
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They tell us that Suicide is the greatest piece of Cowardice... That Suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in this world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.
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Arthur Schopenhauer
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It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
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Emil M. Cioran (The Trouble With Being Born)
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unless it comes out of your soul like a rocket, unless being still would drive you to madness or suicide or murder, don't do it. unless the sun inside you is burning your gut, don't do it. when it is truly time, and if you have been chosen, it will do it by itself and it will keep on doing it until you die or it dies in you. there is no other way. and there never was.
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Charles Bukowski
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When you're young and healthy you can plan on Monday to commit suicide, and by Wednesday you're laughing again.
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Marilyn Monroe (My Story)
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If wild my breast and sore my pride, I bask in dreams of suicide, If cool my heart and high my head I think 'How lucky are the dead.
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Dorothy Parker (The Complete Poems of Dorothy Parker)
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Instead of committing suicide, people go to work.
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Thomas Bernhard (Correction)
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Nothing was ever in tune. People just blindly grabbed at whatever there was: communism, health foods, zen, surfing, ballet, hypnotism, group encounters, orgies, biking, herbs, Catholicism, weight-lifting, travel, withdrawal, vegetarianism, India, painting, writing, sculpting, composing, conducting, backpacking, yoga, copulating, gambling, drinking, hanging around, frozen yogurt, Beethoven, Back, Buddha, Christ, TM, H, carrot juice, suicide, handmade suits, jet travel, New York City, and then it all evaporated and fell apart. People had to find things to do while waiting to die. I guess it was nice to have a choice.
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Charles Bukowski (Women)
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Suicide is a form of murder - premeditated murder. It isn't something you do the first time you think of doing it. It takes getting used to. And you need the means, the opportunity, the motive. A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind.
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Susanna Kaysen (Girl, Interrupted)
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Let them think what they liked, but I didn't mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank -- but that's not the same thing.
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Joseph Conrad (The Secret Sharer and other stories)
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Some people are just not meant to be in this world. It's just too much for them.
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Phoebe Stone (The Boy on Cinnamon Street)
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By four o'clock, I've discounted suicide in favor of killing everyone else in the entire world instead.
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Warren Ellis (Transmetropolitan, Vol. 3: Year of the Bastard)
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Actually, it was only part of myself I wanted to kill: the part that wanted to kill herself, that dragged me into the suicide debate and made every window, kitchen implement, and subway station a rehearsal for tragedy.
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Susanna Kaysen (Girl, Interrupted)
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I have had to experience so much stupidity, so many vices, so much error, so much nausea, disillusionment and sorrow, just in order to become a child again and begin anew. I had to experience despair, I had to sink to the greatest mental depths, to thoughts of suicide, in order to experience grace.
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Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha)
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Part of me wonders if this is a suicide mission disguised as a game.
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Veronica Roth (Divergent (Divergent, #1))
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I don't want to hurt you or anybody so please forget about me. Just try. Find yourself a better friend.
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Nina LaCour (Hold Still)
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Suicide is a serious thing. And if you know anyone who is suicidal, you need to get them help. No one should be in pain. Everyone should love themselves. Like I love you all.
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Gerard Way
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What's the big fucking deal? Lots of amazing people have committed suicide, and they turned out alright.
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Emilie Autumn (The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls)
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I'm fine. Well, I'm not fine - I'm here." "Is there something wrong with that?" "Absolutely.
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Ned Vizzini (It's Kind of a Funny Story)
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The so-called β€˜psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote β€˜hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling β€˜Don’t!’ and β€˜Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.
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David Foster Wallace
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Tantalus made a wild grab, but the marshmallow committed suicide, diving into the flames.
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Rick Riordan (The Sea of Monsters (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, #2))
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The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.
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David Foster Wallace
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The bravest thing I ever did was continuing my life when I wanted to die.
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Juliette Lewis
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The literal meaning of life is whatever you're doing that prevents you from killing yourself.
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Albert Camus
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In the end, it wasn't death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life.
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Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)
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People pontificate, "Suicide is selfishness." Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call in a cowardly assault on the living. Oafs argue this specious line for varying reason: to evade fingers of blame, to impress one's audience with one's mental fiber, to vent anger, or just because one lacks the necessary suffering to sympathize. Cowardice is nothing to do with it - suicide takes considerable courage. Japanese have the right idea. No, what's selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching.
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David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas)
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I went down to the river, I set down on the bank. I tried to think but couldn't, So I jumped in and sank.
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Langston Hughes
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We cannot tear out a single page of our life, but we can throw the whole book in the fire.
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George Sand (Mauprat)
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I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't.
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Susanna Kaysen
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It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.
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Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)
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My room is so quiet and empty it hurts.
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Nina LaCour (Hold Still)
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We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm.
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Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)
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There was a moment in my life when I really wanted to kill myself. And there was one other moment when I was close to that. . . . But even in my most jaded times, I had some hope.
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Gerard Way
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It is not seen as insane when a fighter, under an attack that will inevitable lead to his death, chooses to take his own life first. In fact, this act has been encouraged for centuries, and is accepted even now as an honorable reason to do the deed. How is it any different when you are under attack by your own mind?
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Emilie Autumn (The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls)
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Its so hard to talk when you want to kill yourself. That's above and beyond everything else, and it's not a mental complaint-it's a physical thing, like it's physically hard to open your mouth and make the words come out. They don't come out smooth and in conjunction with your brain the way normal people's words do; they come out in chunks as if from a crushed-ice dispenser; you stumble on them as they gather behind your lower lip. So you just keep quiet.
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Ned Vizzini (It's Kind of a Funny Story)
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When people kill themselves, they think they're ending the pain, but all they're doing is passing it on to those they leave behind.
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Jeannette Walls
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It is good to be a cynic β€” it is better to be a contented cat β€” and it is best not to exist at all.
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H.P. Lovecraft (Collected Essays 5: Philosophy, Autobiography and Miscellany)
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Killing myself was a matter of such indifference to me that I felt like waiting for a moment when it would make some difference.
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Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Dream of a Ridiculous Man)
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We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
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Joan Didion (The White Album)
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Depression isn't a war you win. It's a battle you fight every day. You never stop, never get to rest. It's one bloody fray after another.
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Shaun David Hutchinson (We Are the Ants)
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You need to spend time crawling alone through shadows to truly appreciate what it is to stand in the sun.
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Shaun Hick
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I know, too, that death is the only god who comes when you call.
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Roger Zelazny (Frost & Fire)
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If they tell you that she died of sleeping pills you must know that she died of a wasting grief, of a slow bleeding at the soul.
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Clifford Odets
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The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.
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Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
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I saw the world from the stars' point of view, and it looked unbearably lonely.
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Shaun David Hutchinson (We Are the Ants)
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There are so many things that I want so badly to tell you but I just can't.
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Nina LaCour (Hold Still)
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There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest β€” whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories β€” comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer.
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Albert Camus
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You might be looking for reasons but there are no reasons.
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Nina LaCour (Hold Still)
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It was easy enough to kill yourself in a fit of despair. It was easy enough to play the martyr. It was harder to do nothing. To endure your life. To wait.
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Erica Jong (Fear of Flying)
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It's a long shot, it's suicide maybe, but I do the only thing I can think of. I lean in and kiss Peeta full on the mouth. His whole body starts shuddering, but I keep my lips pressed to his until I have to come up for air. My hands slide up his wrists to clasp his. "Don't let him take you from me." Peeta's panting hard as he fights the nightmares raging his head. "No. I don't want to. . ." I clench his hands to the point of pain. "Stay with me." His pupils contract to pinpoints, dilate again rapidly, and then return to something resembling normalcy. "Always," he murmurs.
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Suzanne Collins (Mockingjay (The Hunger Games, #3))
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There used to be days that I thought I was okay, or at least that I was going to be. We'd be hanging out somewhere and everything would just fit right and I would think 'it will be okay if it can just be like this forever' but of course nothing can ever stay just how it is forever.
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Nina LaCour (Hold Still)
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No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun β€” for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax β€” This won't hurt
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Hunter S. Thompson
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Dr. Armonson stitched up her wrist wounds. Within five minutes of the transfusion he declared her out of danger. Chucking her under the chin, he said, "What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets." And it was then Cecilia gave orally what was to be her only form of suicide note, and a useless one at that, because she was going to live: "Obviously, Doctor," she said, "you've never been a thirteen-year-old girl.
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Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)
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I was sentimental about many things: a woman’s shoes under the bed; one hairpin left behind on the dresser; the way they said, 'I’m going to pee.' hair ribbons; walking down the boulevard with them at 1:30 in the afternoon, just two people walking together; the long nights of drinking and smoking; talking; the arguments; thinking of suicide; eating together and feeling good; the jokes; the laughter out of nowhere; feeling miracles in the air; being in a parked car together; comparing past loves at 3am; being told you snore; hearing her snore; mothers, daughters, sons, cats, dogs; sometimes death and sometimes divorce; but always carring on, always seeing it through; reading a newspaper alone in a sandwich joint and feeling nausea because she’s now married to a dentist with an I.Q. of 95; racetracks, parks, park picnics; even jails; her dull friends; your dull friends; your drinking, her dancing; your flirting, her flirting; her pills, your fucking on the side and her doing the same; sleeping together
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Charles Bukowski (Women)
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i think the idea of a 'mental health day' is something completely invented by people who have no clue what it's like to have bad mental health. the idea that your mind can be aired out in twenty-four hours is kind of like saying heart disease can be cured if you eat the right breakfast cereal. mental health days only exist for people who have the luxury of saying 'i don't want to deal with things today' and then can take the whole day off, while the rest of us are stuck fighting the fights we always fight, with no one really caring one way or another, unless we choose to bring a gun to school or ruin the morning announcements with a suicide.
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David Levithan (Will Grayson, Will Grayson)
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Do you know how far the wall is from the mines?” He gave her blank look. She closed her eyes and sighed dramatically. β€œFrom my shaft, it was three hundred sixty-three feet. I had someone measure.” β€œSo?” Dorian repeated. β€œCaptain Westfall, how far do slaves make it from the mines when they try to escape?” β€œThree feet,” he muttered. β€œEndovier sentries usually shoot a man down before he's moved three feet.” The Crown Prince's silence was not her desired effect. β€œYou knew it was suicide,” he said at last, the amusement gone. Perhaps it had been a bad idea to bring up the wall. β€œYes.” ... β€œI never intended to escape.
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Sarah J. Maas (Throne of Glass (Throne of Glass, #1))
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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.
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Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)
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Yes Yes when God created love he didn't help most when God created dogs He didn't help dogs when God created plants that was average when God created hate we had a standard utility when God created me He created me when God created the monkey He was asleep when He created the giraffe He was drunk when He created narcotics He was high and when He created suicide He was low when He created you lying in bed He knew what He was doing He was drunk and He was high and He created the mountains and the sea and fire at the same time He made some mistakes but when He created you lying in bed He came all over His Blessed Universe.
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Charles Bukowski
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I wanted to kill the me underneath. That fact haunted my days and nights. When you realize you hate yourself so much, when you realize that you cannot stand who you are, and this deep spite has been the motivation behind your behavior for many years, your brain can’t quite deal with it. It will try very hard to avoid that realization; it will try, in a last-ditch effort to keep your remaining parts alive, to remake the rest of you. This is, I believe, different from the suicidal wish of those who are in so much pain that death feels like relief, different from the suicide I would later attempt, trying to escape that pain. This is a wish to murder yourself; the connotation of kill is too mild. This is a belief that you deserve slow torture, violent death.
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Marya Hornbacher (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)
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Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier 'til this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that – everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been. V.
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Virginia Woolf
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So we gave up. I'd finally had enough of chasing after a ghost who did not want to be discovered. We'd failed, maybe, but some mysteries aren't meant to be solved. I still did not know her as I wanted to, but I never could. She made it impossible for me. And the accident, the suicide, would never be anything else, and I was left to ask, Did I help you to a fate you didn't want, Alaska, or did I jsut assist in your willful self-destruction? Because they are different crimes, and I didn't know wheter to feel angry at myself for letting go. But we knew what could be found out, and in finding out, she had made us closer- the Colonel adn Takumi and me, anyway. And that was it. She didn't leave me enough to discover her, but she left me enough to rediscover the Great Perhaps.
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John Green (Looking for Alaska)
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I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be... This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in any of these ages...the delayed adolescent, the childish adult, but that they are in me to be drawn on; to forget is a form of suicide... Far too many people misunderstand what *putting away childish things* means, and think that forgetting what it is like to think and feel and touch and smell and taste and see and hear like a three-year-old or a thirteen-year-old or a twenty-three-year-old means being grownup. When I'm with these people I, like the kids, feel that if this is what it means to be a grown-up, then I don't ever want to be one. Instead of which, if I can retain a child's awareness and joy, and *be* fifty-one, then I will really learn what it means to be grownup.
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Madeleine L'Engle
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Nobody can say anything about you. Whatsoever people say is about themselves. But you become very shaky, because you are still clinging to a false center. That false center depends on others, so you are always looking to what people are saying about you. And you are always following other people, you are always trying to satisfy them. You are always trying to be respectable, you are always trying to decorate your ego. This is suicidal. Rather than being disturbed by what others say, you should start looking inside yourself… Whenever you are self-conscious you are simply showing that you are not conscious of the self at all. You don’t know who you are. If you had known, then there would have been no problemβ€” then you are not seeking opinions. Then you are not worried what others say about youβ€” it is irrelevant! When you are self-conscious you are in trouble. When you are self-conscious you are really showing symptoms that you don’t know who you are. Your very self-consciousness indicates that you have not come home yet.
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Osho
β€œ
Anne, I don't want to live. . . . Now listen, life is lovely, but I Can't Live It. I can't even explain. I know how silly it sounds . . . but if you knew how it Felt. To be alive, yes, alive, but not be able to live it. Ay that's the rub. I am like a stone that lives . . . locked outside of all that's real. . . . Anne, do you know of such things, can you hear???? I wish, or think I wish, that I were dying of something for then I could be brave, but to be not dying, and yet . . . and yet to [be] behind a wall, watching everyone fit in where I can't, to talk behind a gray foggy wall, to live but to not reach or to reach wrong . . . to do it all wrong . . . believe me, (can you?) . . . what's wrong. I want to belong. I'm like a jew who ends up in the wrong country. I'm not a part. I'm not a member. I'm frozen.
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Anne Sexton (Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters)
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One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die. This life appears unbearable, another unattainable. One is no longer ashamed of wanting to die; one asks to be moved from the old cell, which one hates, to a new one, which one willl only in time come to hate. In this there is also a residue of belief that during the move the master will chance to come along the corridor, look at the prisoner and say: "This man is not to be locked up again, He is to come with me.
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Franz Kafka (Blue Octavo Notebooks)
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Don't exist. Live. Get out, explore. Thrive. Challenge authority. Challenge yourself. Evolve. Change forever. Become who you say you always will. Keep moving. Don't stop. Start the revolution. Become a freedom fighter. Become a superhero. Just because everyone doesn't know your name doesn't mean you dont matter. Are you happy? Have you ever been happy? What have you done today to matter? Did you exist or did you live? How did you thrive? Become a chameleon-fit in anywhere. Be a rockstar-stand out everywhere. Do nothing, do everything. Forget everything, remember everyone. Care, don't just pretend to. Listen to everyone. Love everyone and nothing at the same time. Its impossible to be everything,but you can't stop trying to do it all. All I know is that I have no idea where I am right now. I feel like I am in training for something, making progress with every step I take. I fear standing still. It is my greatest weakness. I talk big, but often don't follow through. That's my biggest problem. I don't even know what to think right now. It's about time I start to take a jump. Fuck starting to take. Just jump-over everything. Leap. It's time to be aggressive. You've started to speak your mind, now keep going with it, but not with the intention of sparking controversy or picking a germane fight. Get your gloves on, it's time for rebirth. There IS no room for the nice guys in the history books. THIS IS THE START OF A REVOLUTION. THE REVOLUTION IS YOUR LIFE. THE GOAL IS IMMORTALITY. LET'S LIVE, BABY. LET'S FEEL ALIVE AT ALL TIMES. TAKE NO PRISONERS. HOLD NO SOUL UNACCOUNTABLE, ESPECIALLY NOT YOUR OWN. IF SOMETHING DOESN'T HAPPEN, IT'S YOUR FAULT. Make this moment your reckoning. Your head has been held under water for too long and now it is time to rise up and take your first true breath. Do everything with exact calculation, nothing without meaning. Do not make careful your words, but make no excuses for what you say. Fuck em' all. Set a goal for everyday and never be tired.
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Brian Krans (A Constant Suicide)
β€œ
We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out windows, or drown themselves, or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us are slowly devoured by some disease, or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) know these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so...
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Michael Cunningham (The Hours)