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Word Gems exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity
Suicide, Transition, Dying
Arthur Schopenhauer: “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.”
Editor's 1-Minute Essay: Suicide, Transition, Dying Editor's 1-Minute Essay: Summerland The Scientific Evidence For The Afterlife
Arthur Schopenhauer: “It will generally be found that, as soon as the terrors of life reach the point at which they outweigh the terrors of death, a man will put an end to his life. But the terrors of death offer considerable resistance; they stand like a sentinel at the gate leading out of this world. Perhaps there is no man alive who would not have already put an end to his life, if this end had been of a purely negative character, a sudden stoppage of existence. There is something positive about it; it is the destruction of the body; and a man shrinks from that, because his body is the manifestation of the will to live.” Emilie Autumn, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls: “It is not seen as insane when a fighter, under an attack that will inevitably 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?” William Shakespeare, Hamlet: “To be, or not to be: that is the question: Ned Vizzini, It's Kind of a Funny Story: “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.” Nina LaCour, Hold Still: “My room is so quiet and empty it hurts.” Marian Keyes, Lucy Sullivan Is Getting Married: “It was ironic, really - you want to die because you can't be bothered to go on living - but then you're expected to get all energetic and move furniture and stand on chairs and hoist ropes and do complicated knots and attach things to other things and kick stools from under you and mess around with hot baths and razor blades and extension cords and electrical appliances and weedkiller. Suicide was a complicated, demanding business, often involving visits to hardware shops. And if you've managed to drag yourself from the bed and go down the road to the garden center or the drug store, by then the worst is over. At that point you might as well just go to work.” David Foster Wallace: “The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘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 ‘Don’t!’ and ‘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.” Albert Camus: “But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.” Tiffanie DeBartolo, How to Kill a Rock Star: “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.” Arthur Schopenhauer: “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.” Clifford Odets: “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.” Friedrich Nietzsche: “The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night.” Vincent Van Gogh: “...and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?” John Steinbeck, Cannery Row: “It was deeply a part of Lee's kindness and understanding that man's right to kill himself is inviolable, but sometimes a friend can make it unnecessary.” Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending: “In the letter he left for the coroner he had explained his reasoning (for suicide): that life is a gift bestowed without anyone asking for it; that the thinking person has a philosophical duty to examine both the nature of life and the conditions it comes with; and that if this person decides to renounce the gift no one asks for, it is the moral and human duty to act on the consequences of that decision. ... Alex showed me a clipping from the Cambridge Evening News. 'Tragic Death of "Promising" Young Man.' ... The verdict of the coroner's inquest had been that Adrian Flinn (22) had killed himself 'while the balance of his mind was disturbed.' ... The law, and society, and religion all said it was impossible to be sane, healthy, and kill yourself. Perhaps those authorities feared that the suicide's reasoning might impugn the nature and value of life as organised by the state which paid the coroner?” Charles Bukowski: “I went to the worst of bars hoping to get killed but all I could do was to get drunk again.” Sally Brampton, Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression: “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.” Bill Maher: “Suicide is man's way of telling God, 'You can't fire me - I quit!” Emil M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born: “It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.” Kay Redfield Jamison, Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide: “When people are suicidal, their thinking is paralyzed, their options appear spare or nonexistent, their mood is despairing, and hopelessness permeates their entire mental domain. The future cannot be separated from the present, and the present is painful beyond solace. ‘This is my last experiment,’ wrote a young chemist in his suicide note. ‘If there is any eternal torment worse than mine I’ll have to be shown.” John Fowles, The Magus: “To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.” David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas: “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.” Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted: “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.” Shaun David Hutchinson, We Are the Ants: “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.” Søren Kierkegaard: “I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away — yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth's orbit ——————————— and wanted to shoot myself.” Sophocles: “When he endures nothing but endless miseries-- What pleasure is there in living the day after day, Edging slowly back and forth toward death? Anyone who warms their heart with the glow Of flickering hope is worth nothing at all. The noble man should either live with honor or die with honor. That's all there is to be said.” Phoebe Stone, The Boy on Cinnamon Street: “Some people are just not meant to be in this world. It's just too much for them.” Marilyn Monroe, My Story: “When you're young and healthy you can plan on Monday to commit suicide, and by Wednesday you're laughing again.” Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places: “People rarely bring flowers to a suicide.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man: “Killing myself was a matter of such indifference to me that I felt like waiting for a moment when it would make some difference.” Gene Lester: “Preventing a suicide is not necessarily a beneficent act if it forces the potential suicide to continue in a life of misery.” Munia Khan: “Souls are flowers, only God has the right to pluck them. But those who commit suicide: their souls are the rotten blossoms of devil's garden.” Akira Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography: “If the Emperor had not delivered his [15 August 1945] address urging the Japanese people to lay down their swords—if that speech had been a call instead for the Honorable Death of the Hundred Million—those people on that street in Soshigaya probably would have done what they were told and died. And probably I would have done likewise. The Japanese see self-assertion as immoral and self-sacrifice as the sensible course to take in life. We were accustomed to this teaching and had never thought to question it.” Courtney Love, Dirty Blonde: The Diaries of Courtney Love: “The language of love letters is the same as suicide notes.” Shaun Hick: “You need to spend time crawling alone through shadows to truly appreciate what it is to stand in the sun.” André Breton, Anthology of Black Humor: “Life’s greatest gift is the freedom it leaves you to step out of it whenever you choose.” William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness: “A phenomenon that a number of people have noted while in deep depression is the sense of being accompanied by a second self — a wraithlike observer who, not sharing the dementia of his double, is able to watch with dispassionate curiosity as his companion struggles against the oncoming disaster, or decides to embrace it. There is a theatrical quality about all this, and during the next several days, as I went about stolidly preparing for extinction, I couldn't shake off a sense of melodrama — a melodrama in which I, the victim-to-be of self-murder, was both the solitary actor and lone member of the audience.”
Jay Asher, Thirteen Reasons Why: “Suicide. It's something I've been thinking about. Not too seriously, but I have been thinking about it. That's the note. Word for word. And I know it's word for word because I wrote it dozens of times before delivering it. I'd write it, throw it away, write it, crumple it up, throw it away. But why was I writing it to begin with? I asked myself that question every time I printed the words onto a new sheet of paper. Why was I writing this note? It was a lie. I hadn't been thinking about it. Not really. Not in detail. The thought would come into my head and I'd push it away. But I pushed it away a lot.” Ned Vizzini, It's Kind of a Funny Story: “(...) Since I was a kid." "Which you refer to as 'back when you were happy.'" "Right.” Robert E. Neale, The Art of Dying: “Chronic anxiety is a state more undesirable than any other, and we will try almost any maneuver to eliminate it. Modern man is living in anxious anticipation of destruction. Such anxiety can be easily eliminated by self-destruction. As a German saying puts it: 'Better an end with terror than a terror without end.” David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest: “I think there must be probably different types of suicides. I'm not one of the self-hating ones. The type of like "I'm shit and the world'd be better off without poor me" type that says that but also imagines what everybody'll say at their funeral. I've met types like that on wards… I didn't want to especially hurt myself. Or like punish. I don't hate myself. I just wanted out. I didn't want to play anymore is all. I wanted to just stop being conscious. I'm a whole different type. I wanted to stop feeling this way.” Robert E. Neale, The Art of Dying: “Suicide is an attack on society--an attack on its omnipotence, on its denial of death, and on its own despair.” Mary Beth Miller, Aimee: “Why do people kill themselves? I think they do it when they can no longer find a reason to keep going. When nothing in heir lives is good enough to balance out the bad. And they do it when they no longer have the courage to carry on past some recent painful experience. They commit what is, in the end, a desperate, final call for help, that is hopefully heard in time by someone else. And what if it's not heard in time? I ask although I know the answer. Then they die.” Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath: “… when you are alone in your room with the clock ticking loudly into the false cheerful brilliance of the electric light. And if you have no past or future which, after all, is all that the present is made of, why then you may as well dispose of the empty shell of present and commit suicide.” Charlotte Brontë, Shirley: “God surely did not create us, and cause us to live, with the sole end of wishing always to die. I believe, in my heart, we were intended to prize life and enjoy it, so long as we retain it. Existence never was originally meant to be that useless, blank, pale, slow-trailing thing it often becomes to many, and is becoming to me, among the rest.”
Édouard Levé: “You were said to have died of suffering. But you died because you searched for happiness at the risk of finding the void.” Robert E. Neale, The Art of Dying: “The suicide passes a judgment. Society does not care to examine the judgment, but in defense of itself as is, condemns the suicide.” David Hume, Essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul: “No man ever threw away life while it was worth keeping.” Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down: “And why is it the biggest sin of all? All your life you're told that you'll be going to this marvelous place when you pass on. And the one thing you can do to get you there a bit quicker is something that stops you getting there at all. Oh, I can see that it's a kind of queue-jumping. But if someone jumps the queue at the Post Office, people tut. Or sometimes they say, ‘Excuse me, I was here first.’ They don't say, ‘You will be consumed by hellfire for all eternity.’ That would be a bit strong.” Bertrand Russell: “There was a footpath leading across fields to New Southgate, and I used to go there alone to watch the sunset and contemplate suicide. I did not, however, commit suicide, because I wished to know more of mathematics.”
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