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Suicide

  • Suicide is the most private and mysterious of acts, inexplicable because the chief actor is never there to explain it.

  • We cannot blot out one page of our lives, but we can throw the book in the fire.

  • 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.

  • Killing herself was the ultimate conversation stopper, the final saying, 'No backs.'

    • Jane Rule,
    • "In the Attic of the House," Christopher Street ()
  • ... it was harder to drown at sunrise than in darkness.

  • Suicide is part murder, revenge on those who hurt you, just as murder is part suicide, for a murderer knows he risks losing his life ...

  • Youth knows no remedy for grief but death.

    • Winifred Holtby,
    • "The Right Side of Thirty" (1930), Pavements at Anderby ()
  • ... suicides have a special language. / Like carpenters they want to know which tools. / They never ask why build.

  • [I] have fantasies of killing myself and thus being the powerful one not the powerless one.

    • Anne Sexton,
    • 1964, in Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames, eds., Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters ()
  • I think it will be a miracle if I don't someday end up killing myself.

    • Anne Sexton,
    • 1964, in Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames, eds., Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters ()
  • [On suicide:] It's the only cause of death that can be used as a noun to describe the dead person. If you die of cancer you are not called 'a cancer.' If someone else shoots you, you are not referred to as 'a murder.' But if you shoot yourself, you are labeled as a suicide. Your death becomes your definition.

  • It takes far less courage to kill yourself than it takes to make yourself wake up one more time. It's harder to stay where you are than to get out.

  • I don't think suicide is so terrible, in fact, I find it quite vital. Everybody should choose life every day. Some rainy winter Sundays when there's a little boredom, you should always carry a gun. Not to shoot yourself, but to know exactly that you're always making a choice.

  • I don't want to die. But I want to be dead.

    • Jean Ingelow,
    • in Anonymous, Some Recollections of Jean Ingelow and Her Early Friends ()
  • ... suicide can be used as a very cruel weapon, you know. It can be the ultimate revenge, leaving a scar that a living person may carry to the grave.

  • Some people say that suicide is a sin, but I have never believed that. I say it's God's way of calling certain folks home early. It's much nicer than an awful accident, where the rest of us are left wondering if the person really wanted to go.

  • A suicide is both a rebuke to the living and a puzzle that defies them to solve it. Like a poem, suicide is finished and refuses to answer questions as to its final cause.

    • Margaret Atwood,
    • "Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters," Second Words: Selected Critical Prose ()
  • The suicide does not play the game, does not observe the rules. He leaves the party too soon, and leaves the other guests painfully uncomfortable.

    • Joyce Carol Oates,
    • "The Art of Suicide," in Margaret Pabst Battin, ed., Suicide: The Philsophical Issues ()
  • There is an assumption, in attaching Puritan concepts such as 'successful' and 'unsuccessful' to the awful, final act of suicide, that those who 'fail' at killing themselves not only are weak, but incompetent, incapable even of getting their dying quite right.

  • Suicide is not a blot on anyone's name; it is a tragedy.

  • Pulled from the water, the suicide is obliged to begin again to die.

  • The compulsion to rescue willy-nilly those who are drowning strikes to the heart of our freedoms. I am all for fishing out of the water those who fall in, but let us respect those who have thrown themselves in.

  • ... suicide is a crime — the only crime that, if successful, guarantees that the perpetrator will not be punished for it. This makes it the most serious crime of all.

  • ... suicide is the ultimate 'one-up,' as it were, the accusation that brooks no defense, the argument won at last.

  • [On a woman's suicide:] God did not call her home, but he welcomed her.

  • ... I don't see why people consider suicide cowardice. I think it has a certain dignity — like leaving before you're fired.

  • 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.

  • ... people commit suicide for only one reason — to escape torment.