Vague Suicidal Quotes

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Oh God just look at me now... one night opens words and utters pain... I cannot begin to explain to you... this... I am not here. This is not happening. Oh wait, it is, isn't it? I am a ghost. I am not here, not really. You see skin and cuts and frailty...these are symptoms, you known, of a ghost. An unclear image with unclear thoughts whispering vague things... If I told you what was really in my head, you''d never let me leave this place. And I have no desire to spend time in hell while I'm still, in theory, alive.
Emily Andrews (The Finer Points of Becoming Machine (Cutting Edge))
At first, suicide was just a word, a vague idea separate from reality. It pointed at a way that other people chose to die, people I didn't even know. But once the word became my own, it took on the strangest shape. I could feel it growing deep inside of me. Suicide wasn't something that happened to strangers. I could make it happen, if I wanted to.
Mieko Kawakami (Heaven)
He did not care what the end would be, and in his lucid moments overvalued his indifference. The danger, when not seen, has the imperfect vagueness of human thought. The fear grows shadowy; and Imagination, the enemy of men, the father of all terrors, unstimulated, sinks to rest in the dullness of exhausted emotion.
Joseph Conrad (Lord Jim)
At least when I was an adult, I had a name for what was wrong with me: manic depression. It's easier to make sense of things - even very disturbing things like sexual acting out and suicidality - when there's a big, fat label slapped on top. But as a child, I knew nothing. I had no diagnosis. All I had was a vague and gnawing awareness that I was different from other children, and that different was not good. Different must be kept hidden.
Terri Cheney (The Dark Side of Innocence: Growing Up Bipolar)
I brought the newspaper close up to my eyes to get a better view of George Pollucci's face, spotlighted like a three-quarter moon against a vague background of brick and black sky. I felt he had something important to tell me, and that whatever it was might just be written on his face. But the smudgy crags of George Pollucci's features melted away as I peered at them, and resolved themselves into a regular pattern of dark and light and medium gray dots. The inky black newspaper paragraph didn't tell why Mr Pollucci was on the ledge, or what Sgt Kilmartin did to him when he finally got him in through the window.
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
To every man of great age - to Sir Wlater Bentham himself - the idea of suicide has once at least been present in the ante-room of his soul; on the threshold, waiting to enter, held out from the inmost chamber by some chance reality, some vague fear, some painful hope. The Man of Property, p. 363
John Galsworthy
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.
Jerry Pinto (Em and The Big Hoom)
Back then, living hadn't had any meaning. Every so often, without any warning or any real reason, he'd even caught himself thinking, 'Maybe I'll try dying.' He'd had one foot in the world of the dead, and yet the other foot had been chained to the world of the living, and he couldn't pull it out; he'd just looed on disinterestedly, sort of like it was all happening on the other side of some window, as the dull, vague world passed him by. Never making any more to walk out into it himself. Somewhere along the way, though, he'd stopped thinking about trying to die. He wondered when that had happened.
Yukako Kabei (Kieli, Volume 9: The Dead Sleep Eternally in the Wilderness, Part 2)
For a ghost story, the tale of Violet Saville Devohr was vague and underwhelming. She had lived, she was unhappy, and she died by her own hand somewhere in that vast house. If the house hadn't been a mansion, if the death hadn't been a suicide, if Violet Devohr's dark, refined beauty hadn't smouldered down from that massive oil portrait, it wouldn't have been a ghost story at all. Beauty and wealth, it seems, get you as far in the afterlife as they do here on earth. We can't all afford to be ghosts.
Rebecca Makkai (The Hundred-Year House)
Your life has been made up of chambers, a series of chambers, so the interlocutor said, his hand on my arm — and in each chamber it is difficult to remember exactly what it was like to be in the previous room. You can remember that certain things happened when you were a child. But, what it was like to be there, to be a child, it really is lost to you. Our world is a difficult succession of losses, vaguely remembered, vaguely enshrined.
Jesse Ball (A Cure for Suicide)
for every Christian feels the same, however vaguely he may do so. Socialism, Communism, Anarchism' Salvation Armies, the growth of crime, freedom from toil, the increasingly absurd luxury of the rich and increased misery of the poor, the fearfully rising number of suicides-are all indications of that inner contradiction which must and will be resolved. And, of course, resolved in such a manner that the law of love will be recognized and all reliance on force abandoned.
Mahatma Gandhi (Letters from One: Correspondence (and more) of Leo Tolstoy and Mohandas Gandhi; including ‘Letter to a Hindu’ [a selected edit] (River Drafting Spirit Series Book 3))
Until my thirtieth year, I lived in a state of almost continuous anxiety interspersed with periods of suicidal depression. It feels now as if I am talking about some past lifetime or somebody else’s life. One night not long after my twenty-ninth birthday, I woke up in the early hours with a feeling of absolute dread. I had woken up with such a feeling many times before, but this time it was more intense than it had ever been. The silence of the night, the vague outlines of the furniture in the dark room, the distant noise of a passing train – everything felt so alien, so hostile, and so utterly meaningless that it created in me a deep loathing of the world. The most loathsome thing of all, however, was my own existence. What was the point in continuing to live with this burden of misery? Why carry on with this continuous struggle? I could feel that a deep longing for annihilation, for nonexistence, was now becoming much stronger than the instinctive desire to continue to live. ‘I cannot live with myself any longer.’ This was the thought that kept repeating itself in my mind. Then suddenly I became aware of what a peculiar thought it was. ‘Am I one or two? If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the ‘I’ and the ‘self’ that ‘I’ cannot live with.’ ‘Maybe,’ I thought, ‘only one of them is real.’ I was so stunned by this strange realization that my mind stopped. I was fully conscious, but there were no more thoughts. Then I felt drawn into what seemed like a vortex of energy. It was a slow movement at first and then accelerated. I was gripped by an intense fear, and my body started to shake. I heard the words ‘resist nothing,’ as if spoken inside my chest. I could feel myself being sucked into a void. It felt as if the void was inside myself rather than outside. Suddenly, there was no more fear, and I let myself fall into that void. I have no recollection of what happened after that. I was awakened by the chirping of a bird outside the window. I had never heard such a sound before. My eyes were still closed, and I saw the image of a precious diamond. Yes, if a diamond could make a sound, this is what it would be like. I opened my eyes. The first light of dawn was filtering through the curtains. Without any thought, I felt, I knew, that there is infinitely more to light than we realize. That soft luminosity filtering through the curtains was love itself. Tears came into my eyes. I got up and walked around the room. I recognized the room, and yet I knew that I had never truly seen it before. Everything was fresh and pristine, as if it had just come into existence. I picked up things, a pencil, an empty bottle, marvelling at the beauty and aliveness of it all. That day I walked around the city in utter amazement at the miracle of life on earth, as if I had just been born into this world.
Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment)
Speaking of the happy new year, I wonder if any year ever had less chance of being happy. It’s as though the whole race were indulging in a kind of species introversion — as though we looked inward on our neuroses. And the thing we see isn’t very pretty. Before the year is over, I think I will be looking back longingly on the Gulf of Lower California — that sea of mirages and timelessness. It is a very magical place. It is cold and clear here now - the leaves all fallen from the trees and only the frogs are very happy. Great cheering sections of frogs singing all the time. The earth is moist and water is seeping out of the ground everywhere. So we go into this happy new year, knowing that our species has learned nothing, can, as a race, learn nothing — that the experience of ten thousand years has made no impression on the instincts of the million years that preceded. Maybe you can find some vague theology that will give you hope. Not that I have lost any hope. All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up. It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die. I don’t know why we should expect it to. It seems fairly obvious that two sides of a mirror are required before one has a mirror, that two forces are necessary in man before he is man. I asked Paul de Kruif once if he would like to cure all disease and he said yes. Then I suggested that the man he loved and wanted to cure was a product of all his filth and disease and meanness, his hunger and cruelty. Cure those and you would have not man but an entirely new species you wouldn’t recognize and probably wouldn’t like. There it is — It is interesting to watch the German efficiency, which, from the logic of the machine is efficient but which (I suspect) from the mechanics of the human species is suicidal. Certainly man thrives best (or has at least) in a state of semi-anarchy. Then he has been strong, inventive, reliant, moving. But cage him with rules, feed him and make him healthy and I think he will die as surely as a caged wolf dies. I should not be surprised to see a cared for, thought for, planned for nation disintegrate, while a ragged, hungry, lustful nation survived. Surely no great all-encompassing plan has ever succeeded. And so I'll look to see this German plan collapse because they do not know enough to plan for everything.
John Steinbeck (Steinbeck: A Life in Letters)
The nuggets themselves are pillow-shaped and vaguely striated to echo piratical treasure chests. Now, with a flake-type of cereal, Randy’s strategy would never work. But then, Cap’n Crunch in a flake form would be suicidal madness; it would last about as long, when immersed in milk, as snowflakes sifting down into a deep fryer. No, the cereal engineers at General Mills had to find a shape that would minimize surface area, and, as some sort of compromise between the sphere that is dictated by Euclidean geometry and whatever sunken-treasure-related shapes that the cereal-aestheticians were probably clamoring for, they came up with this hard-to-pin-down striated pillow formation. The important thing, for Randy’s purposes, is that the individual pieces of Cap’n Crunch are, to a very rough approximation, shaped
Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon)
I like rainbows. We came back down to the meadow near the steaming terrace and sat in the river, just where one of the bigger hot streams poured into the cold water of the Ferris Fork. It is illegal – not to say suicidal – to bathe in any of the thermal features of the park. But when those features empty into the river, at what is called a hot pot, swimming and soaking are perfectly acceptable. So we were soaking off our long walk, talking about our favorite waterfalls, and discussing rainbows when it occurred to us that the moon was full. There wasn’t a hint of foul weather. And if you had a clear sky and a waterfall facing in just the right direction… Over the course of a couple of days we hked back down the canyon to the Boundary Creek Trail and followed it to Dunanda Falls, which is only about eight miles from the ranger station at the entrance to the park. Dunanda is a 150-foot-high plunge facing generally south, so that in the afternoons reliable rainbows dance over the rocks at its base. It is the archetype of all western waterfalls. Dunenda is an Indian name; in Shoshone it means “straight down,” which is a pretty good description of the plunge. ... …We had to walk three miles back toward the ranger station and our assigned campsite. We planned to set up our tents, eat, hang our food, and walk back to Dunanda Falls in the dark, using headlamps. We could be there by ten or eleven. At that time the full moon would clear the east ridge of the downriver canyon and would be shining directly on the fall. Walking at night is never a happy proposition, and this particular evening stroll involved five stream crossings, mostly on old logs, and took a lot longer than we’d anticipated. Still, we beat the moon to the fall. Most of us took up residence in one or another of the hot pots. Presently the moon, like a floodlight, rose over the canyon rim. The falling water took on a silver tinge, and the rock wall, which had looked gold under the sun, was now a slick black so the contrast of water and rock was incomparably stark. The pools below the lip of the fall were glowing, as from within, with a pale blue light. And then it started at the base of the fall: just a diagonal line in the spray that ran from the lower east to the upper west side of the wall. “It’s going to happen,” I told Kara, who was sitting beside me in one of the hot pots. Where falling water hit the rock at the base of the fall and exploded upward in vapor, the light was very bright. It concentrated itself in a shining ball. The diagonal line was above and slowly began to bend until, in the fullness of time (ten minutes, maybe), it formed a perfectly symmetrical bow, shining silver blue under the moon. The color was vaguely electrical. Kara said she could see colors in the moonbow, and when I looked very hard, I thought I could make out a faint line of reddish orange above, and some deep violet at the bottom. Both colors were very pale, flickering, like bad florescent light. In any case, it was exhilarating, the experience of a lifetime: an entirely perfect moonbow, silver and iridescent, all shining and spectral there at the base of Dunanda Falls. The hot pot itself was a luxury, and I considered myself a pretty swell fellow, doing all this for the sanity of city dwellers, who need such things more than anyone else. I even thought of naming the moonbow: Cahill’s Luminescence. Something like that. Otherwise, someone else might take credit for it.
Tim Cahill (Lost in My Own Backyard: A Walk in Yellowstone National Park (Crown Journeys))
She went on speaking, and he did not interrupt her, but gathered up, with an eager and sorrowful piety, the words that fell from her lips, feeling (and rightly feeling, since she was hiding the truth behind them as she spoke) that, like the sacred veil, they retained a vague imprint, traced a faint outline, of that infinitely precious and, alas, undiscoverable reality—what she had been doing that afternoon at three o'clock when he had called—of which he would never possess any more than these falsifications, illegible and divine traces, and which would exist henceforward only in the secretive memory of this woman who could contemplate it in utter ignorance of its value but would never yield it up to him. Of course it occurred to him from time to time that Odette's daily activities were not in themselves passionately interesting, and that such relations as she might have with other men did not exhale naturally, universally and for every rational being a spirit of morbid gloom capable of infecting with fever or of inciting to suicide. He realised at such moments that that interest, that gloom, existed in him alone, like a disease, and that once he was cured of this disease, the actions of Odette, the kisses that she might have bestowed, would become once again as innocuous as those of countless other women. But the consciousness that the painful curiosity which he now brought to them had its origin only in himself was not enough to make Swann decide that it was unreasonable to regard that curiosity as important and to take every possible step to satisfy it.
Marcel Proust (Swann’s Way (In Search of Lost Time, #1))
A few minutes later she was concentrating on her novel, which was half-finished. The theme of this book was a suicide. The death of a young man who had not known he was going to commit suicide until the moment of death, when he understood that he had in fact been preparing for it, and in great detail, for months. The point of the novel would be the contrast between the surface of his life, which was orderly and planned, yet without any long-term objective, and an underlying motif which had reference only to the suicide, which would lead up to the suicide. His plans for his future were all vague and impossible, in contrast with the sharp practicality of his present life. The undercurrent of despair or madness or illogicalness would lead on to, or rather, refer back from, the impossible fantasies of a distant future. So the real continuity of the novel would be in the at first scarcely noticed substratum of despair, the growth of the unknown intention to commit suicide. The moment of death would also be the moment when the real continuity of his life would be understood—a continuity not of order, discipline, practicality, commonsense, but of unreality. It would be understood at the moment of death that the link between the dark need for death, and death, itself, had been the wild, crazy fantasies of a beautiful life; and that the commonsense and the order had been (not as it had seemed earlier in the story) symptoms of sanity, but intimations of madness.
Doris Lessing (The Golden Notebook)
As I walked behind her I became aware that in spite of her being a scrawny type, she wagged very pleasantly and cutely in the blue demin outfit, giving me a sort of vague suicidal hope that this was one of those tabloid jobs where the boss’s young wife picks a playmate out of the office.
John D. MacDonald (Dead Low Tide)
In the end, the historians record rather vaguely, he pursued a course of slow suicide, embarking on a bout of massive over-indulgence which brought about first oblivion and then the death he sought – a death whose timing he had himself predicted years before.
Elizabeth Speller (Following Hadrian: A Second-Century Journey through the Roman Empire)
...What...could the free choice to read 'boring' books be? Reading books that -other people- find boring is not the issue. Ravenous readers do that all the time, looking up only every now and then to wonder vaguely how anyone could be bored by them. The choice to read what is boring to oneself, however, which nearly always involves suppressing the knowledge that one is in fact bored, is a kind of suicide of the mind, a refusal to visit the wellspring of one's own voice.
Heather Cass White (Books Promiscuously Read: Reading as a Way of Life)
Peterson argues that lessons on patriarchy tend to demonize boys, suppressing their natural competitive drive. “Our culture confuses men’s desire for achievement and competence with the patriarchal desire for tyrannical power, and that’s a big mistake,” he says. When an interviewer asserts that men own the vast majority of wealth and that women do more unpaid labor, Peterson responds that it is a tiny proportion of men. “A huge proportion of people who are seriously disaffected are men; most people in prison are men; most people who are on the street are men; most victims of violent crime are men; most people who commit suicide are men; most people who die in wars are men; people who do worse in school are men. Where’s the dominance here, precisely? What you are doing is taking a tiny substratum of hyper-successful men and using that to represent the entire structure of Western society. There’s nothing about that that’s vaguely appropriate.”17 Peterson says the feminists’ labeling of the entirety of Western civilization as a patriarchy just because it contains some corruptions and imperfections that might be called “patriarchal” is irrational and unjust.
David Limbaugh (Guilty By Reason of Insanity: Why The Democrats Must Not Win)
Unfortunately, the problem is complicated by quite irrelevant human needs that claim the attention: for companionship and understanding, for a feeling of participation in the social life of humanity. And of course, for a roof over one’s head, and food and drink. The artist tries to give attention to these, but it is difficult when there are so much more important things to think about; and it is all made more difficult by the hostility of other people who every day arouse the question, Could it be that I’m wrong? Sometimes the strain makes the Outsider-artist think of suicide, but before he gets to that point, the universe is suddenly making sense again, and he has a glimpse of purpose. Moreover, that sense of accord is not the warm, vague harmony of a sleeping baby, but a blazing of all the senses, and a realization of a condition of consciousness unknown to the ordinary bourgeois. He realizes that this was what he left out of account in making up his mental balance-sheet of Pro and Contra in the universe. The Christian might call it a sense of the Fatherhood of God; a Hindu would probably prefer to call it a sense of the Motherhood of God, and his symbolism would be more congenial to the artist, who can only find comparison for the feeling in a child’s confidence in its mother. In any case, these are only symbols of a state that is too little known to human beings for their descriptions of it to be accurate.
Colin Wilson (The Outsider)
Without Daniel and Revelation, we would be left with mere vague and shadowy reflections about the afterlife and the destiny of our human race. We would lack full assurance that it is a good thing to be a good person.” History and Mystery: “What does a kiss have to do with apocalyptic judgment? How did the Moabites help form Hebrew and Christian eschatology? Why do Branch Dividian types and Islamic terrorists seek suicide in apocalyptic fervor but the general public lends it scant attention? How can a lamb be ferocious and a wolf be a pacifist
Bernie Calaway, Discernment from Daniel
Kant vaguely felt that, after all, there was dualism in his epistemology. He did leave room for the possibility of a higher form of existence but did not leave room for the possibility of a genuine knowledge of that higher form. The noumena may or may not exist. At any rate we have no valid knowledge of them. Kant’s subjectivism shut him up within a vicious circle. The result of his dualistic metaphysics was his dualistic epistemology. Or should it be put the other way around? The dualism in his epistemology between intellectual and nonintellectual knowledge, it seems, is the result of his dualistic metaphysic. It was an essential rationalism that Kant fails to shake off. Such a rationalism is suicidal. It lives by the negation of non-rational knowledge. It can not allow that any but intellectual knowledge is true knowledge. It cannot allow that there can be knowledge of particulars. Then how can we get to the knowledge of universals?
Cornelius Van Til (Reformed Epistemology)
Kant vaguely felt that, after all, there was dualism in his epistemology. He did leave room for the possibility of a higher form of existence but did not leave room for the possibility of a genuine knowledge of that higher form. The noumena may or may not exist. At any rate we have no valid knowledge of them. Kant’s subjectivism shut him up within a vicious circle. The result of his dualistic metaphysics was his dualistic epistemology. Or should it be put the other way around? The dualism in his epistemology between intellectual and nonintellectual knowledge, it seems, is the result of his dualistic metaphysic. It was an essential rationalism that Kant fails to shake off. Such a rationalism is suicidal. It lives by the negation of non-rational knowledge. It can not allow that any but intellectual knowledge is true knowledge. It cannot allow that there can be knowledge of particulars. Then how can we get to the knowledge of universals?
Cornelius Van Til (Reformed Epistemology)
Kant vaguely felt that, after all, there was dualism in his epistemology. He did leave room for the possibility of a higher form of existence but did not leave room for the possibility of a genuine knowledge of that higher form. The noumena may or may not exist. At any rate we have no valid knowledge of them. Kant’s subjectivism shut him up within a vicious circle. The result of his dualistic metaphysics was his dualistic epistemology. Or should it be put the other way around? The dualism in his epistemology between intellectual and nonintellectual knowledge, it seems, is the result of his dualistic metaphysic. It was an essential rationalism that Kant fails to shake off. Such a rationalism is suicidal. It lives by the negation of non-rational knowledge. It can not allow that any but intellectual knowledge is true knowledge. It cannot allow that there can be knowledge of particulars. Then how can we get to the knowledge of universals?
Cornelius Van Til (Reformed Epistemology)