suicide

A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.

It is not the case that one can create new people on the assumption that if they are not pleased to have come into existence they can simply kill themselves. Once somebody has come into existence and attachments with that person have been formed, suicide can cause the kind of pain that makes the pain of childlessness mild by comparison. Somebody contemplating suicide knows (or should know) this. This places an important obstacle in the way of suicide. One__ life may be bad, but one must consider what affect ending it would have on one__ family and friends. There will be times when life has become so bad that it is unreasonable for the interests of the loved ones in having the person alive to outweigh that person__ interests in ceasing to exist. When this is true will depend in part on particular features of the person for whom continued life is a burden. Different people are able to bear different magnitudes of burden. It may even be indecent for family members to expect that person to continue living. On other occasions one__ life may be bad but not so bad as to warrant killing oneself and thereby making the lives of one__ family and friends still much worse than they already are.

You were said to have died of suffering. But you died because you searched for happiness at the risk of finding the void.

Die, very good, but do not make others die. Suicides like the one which is about to take place here are sublime, but suicide is restricted, and does not allow of extension; and so soon as it affects your neighbors, suicide becomes murder.

We knew that Cecilia had killed herself because she was a misfit, because the beyond called to her, and we knew that her sisters, once abandoned, felt her calling from that place, too.

Coincidences undeniably imply meaning.I am rereading Hart Crane.I notice the dateOn which he stepped off that boatWas April 26.Tomorrow is April 26.The year of his suicide was 1932.I was four.I am now fifty-one.One undeniable implication in this case thenIs that the year, today,Is 1979.Afterward, Crane__ mother scrubbed floors.Eventually, I may or may notJump overboard.Are there questions?

What else is there to do in college except drink beer or slit one's wrists?

By then there had been other men. She'd flung herself at other closed windows. The windows never broke, but her heart, at the end, was in splinters.

The contemplation of suicide, however brooding and painful it might be, is an essential act that may ascend toward something other than what was originally thought of as an end itself, that is, to hastily commit the act without the pleasure of justifying. Like a spiritual meditation, the contemplation of suicide involves a meticulous process of intellectual and emotional planning over some dark and unbearable sleepless nights. Once the thought of suicide has already been decided upon, it becomes irreversible that no amount of justification can change the decision to consummate the act. But life itself is already an act of suicide, to invoke the French-Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran. So why rush, there__ always a romantic way__ particular time or place__o die. (Danny Castillones Sillada, The Pain and the Pleasure of Contemplating Suicide)

You did not fear death. You stepped in its path, but without really desiring it: how can one desire something one doesn__ know? You didn__ deny life but affirmed your taste for the unknown, betting that if something existed on the other side, it would be better than here.

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.

A million people a year kill themselves. Between ten and twenty million people a year try to. Worldwide, men are over three times more likely to kill themselves than women.

The suicide! What would he have done if death did not exist?

I am living in hell from one day to the next. But there is nothing I can do to escape. I don't know where I would go if I did. I feel utterly powerless, and that feeling is my prision. I entered of my own free will, I locked the door, and I threw away the key.

The New York Daily News suggested that my biggest war crime was not killing myself like a gentleman. Presumably Hitler was a gentleman.

Poor little place,' he murmured with a sigh.She heard him. He said the most melancholy things, but she noticed that directly he had said them he always seemed more cheerful than usual. All this phrase-making was a game, she thought, for if she had said half what he said, she would have blown her brains out by now.

Knowing that you want to die makes you less scared.

A man reduced to despair by a series of misfortunes feels wearied of life, but is still so far in possession of his reason that he can ask himself whether it would not be contrary to his duty to himself to take his own life. Now he inquires whether the maxim of his action could become a universal law of nature. His maxim is: From self-love I adopt it as a principle to shorten my life when its longer duration is likely to bring more evil than satisfaction. It is asked then simply whether this principle founded on self-love can become a universal law of nature. Now we see at once that a system of nature of which it should be a law to destroy life by means of the very feeling whose special nature it is to impel to the improvement of life would contradict itself, and therefore could not exist as a system of nature; hence that maxim cannot possibly exist as a universal law of nature, and consequently would be wholly inconsistent with the supreme principle of all duty.