Al Álvarez > Quotes

“No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.”
― Al Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide

“When there is no peril in the fight, there is no glory in the triumph.”
― A. Alvarez

“Suicide creates his own society: to shut yourself off from other people in some dingy, rented box and stare, like Melville's Bartleby, day in and day out at the dead wall outside your window is in itself a rejection of the world which is said to be rejecting you. It is a way of saying, like Bartleby, 'I prefer not to' to every offer and every possibility, which is a condition no amount of social engineering will cure.”
― A. Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide

“Suicide is a confession of failure. And like divorce, it is shrouded in excuses and rationalizations spun endlessly to disguise the simple fact that all one's energy, passion, appetite and ambition have been aborted.”
― A. Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide

“Suicide is, after all, the result of a choice. However impulsive the action and confused the motives, at the moment when a man finally decides to take his own life he achieves a certain temporary clarity. Suicide may be a declaration of bankruptcy which passes judgment on a life as one long history of failure. But it is a decision which, by its very finality, is not wholly a failure. There is, I believe, a whole class of suicides who take their own lives not in order to die but to escape confusion, to clear their heads. They deliberately use suicide to create an unencumbered reality for themselves or to break through the patterns of obsession and necessity which they have unwittingly imposed on their lives.”
― Al Álvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide

“[Sylvia Plath] was now far along a peculiarly solitary road on which not many would risk following her. So it was important for her to know that her messages were coming back clear and strong. Yet not even her determinedly bright self-reliance could disguise the loneliness that came from her almost palpably, like a heat haze. She asked for neither sympathy nor help but, like bereaved widow at a wake, she simply wanted company in her mourning.”
― A. Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide

“I balanced all, brought all to mind, The years to come seemed waste of breath, A waste of breath the years behind In balance with this life, this death. - W. B. YEATS”
― Al Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide

“For the artist himself art is not necessarily therapeutic; he is not automatically relieved of his fantasies by expressing them. Instead, by some perverse logic of creation, the act of formal expressions may simply make the dredged-up material more readily available to him.”
― A. Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide

“I offer no solutions. I don’t, in fact, believe that solutions exist, since suicide means different things for different people at different times.
Because of this there was never any question of motives: you do it because you do it, just as an artist always knows what he knows.”
― Al Álvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide

“When an artist holds up a mirror to nature he finds out who and what he is; but the knowledge may change him irredeemably so that he becomes that image.”
― Al Álvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide

“The pity is not that there is a myth of Sylvia Plath but that the myth is not simply that of an enormously gifted poet whose death came carelessly, by mistake, and too soon.”
― A. Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide

“The earlier poems had all insisted, in their different ways, that she wanted nobody’s help- although I suddenly realized that maybe they had insisted in such a manner as to make you understand that help might be acceptable, if you were willing to make the effort.”
― Al Álvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide

“What,’ asked Coleridge, ‘is the height and ideal of mere association? Delirium”
― Al Álvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide

“The builders forced the lock and found Sylvia sprawled in the kitchen. She was still warm. She had left a note saying, ‘Please call Dr—’, and giving his telephone number. But it was too late. Had everything worked out as it should – had the gas not drugged the man downstairs, preventing him from opening the front door to the au pair girl – there is no doubt she would have been saved. I think she wanted to be; why else leave her doctor’s telephone number? This time, unlike the occasion ten years before, there was too much holding her to life.”
― Al Álvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide

“That seemed to entitle her to speak of suicide as a subject, not as an obsession. It was an act she felt she had a right to as a grown woman and a free agent, in the same way as she felt it to be necessary to her development, given her queer conception of the adult as a survivor, an imaginary Jew from the concentration camps of the mind. Because of this there was never any question of motives: you do it because you do it, just as an artist always knows what he knows.”
― Al Álvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide

“But, as I have written elsewhere, for the artist himself art is not necessarily therapeutic; he is not automatically relieved of his fantasies by expressing them. Instead, by some perverse logic of creation, the act of formal expression may simply make the dredged-up material more readily available to him. The result of handling it in his work may well be that he finds himself living it out. For the artist, in short, nature often imitates art. Or, to change the cliché, when an artist holds a mirror up to nature he finds out who and what he is; but the knowledge may change him irredeemably so that he becomes that image.”
― Al Álvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide

“Someone once said of sex, 'When it's really good it's marvellous, and when it's really bad it's still pretty good.' The Old Man of Hoy looked as if it were going to be something like that: when it's hard it's desperate, and when it's easy it's still pretty hard.”
― Al Álvarez, Feeding the Rat: A Climber's Life on the Edge

“Throughout the world, says a W.H.O. report, at least one thousand people take their own lives each day.”
― Al Álvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide

“Freud’s early theory that suicide is transposed murder, an act of hostility turned away from the object back on to the self, seems to be borne out by Christian superstition and law.”
― Al Álvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide

“Foolish man, what do you bemoan, and what do you fear? Wherever you look there is an end of evils. You see that yawning precipice? It leads to liberty. You see that flood, that river, that well? Liberty houses within them. You see that stunted, parched, and sorry tree? From each branch liberty hangs. Your neck, your throat, your heart are all so many ways of escape from slavery [...] Do you enquire the road to freedom? You shall find it in every vein of your body.”
― A. Alvarez

“door and window as best she could with towels, opened the oven, laid her head in it and turned on the gas.”
― Al Álvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide

“have found it much to her taste, since it is a myth of the poet as a sacrificial victim, offering herself up for the sake of her art, having been dragged by the Muses to that final altar through every kind of distress. In these terms, her suicide becomes the whole point of the story, the act which validates her poems, gives them their interest and proves her seriousness. So people are drawn to her work in much the same spirit as Time featured her at length: not for the poetry but for the gossipy, extra-literary ‘human interest’. Yet just as the suicide adds nothing at all to the poetry, so the myth of Sylvia as a passive victim is a total perversion of the woman she was. It misses altogether her liveliness, her intellectual appetite and harsh wit, her great imaginative resourcefulness and vehemence of feeling, her control.”
― Al Álvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide

“Y cuando descubro que no hay nada lo siento como un rechazo. Probablemente no sea ningún rechazo; lo que pasa es que no hay nada.”
― Al Álvarez, El Dios Salvaje: Ensayo sobre el suicidio

“mucha gente simpática escribe malos versos y los buenos poetas pueden ser monstruos;”
― Al Álvarez, El Dios Salvaje: Ensayo sobre el suicidio

“not kill.’ The bishops were urged into action by St Augustine; but he, as Rousseau remarked, took his arguments from Plato’s Phaedo, not from the Bible. Augustine’s arguments were sharpened by the suicide-mania which was, above all, the distinguishing mark of the early Christians.”
― Al Álvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide

“Después empiezo a tomar somníferos de día para estar dopada y poder dormirme a cualquier hora. Tomar somníferos de día para dormir no está muy lejos de tomar somníferos para morir. Es solo un poco más práctico y un poco más cobarde.”
― Al Álvarez, El Dios Salvaje: Ensayo sobre el suicidio

“Morir es un arte, como todo. Yo lo hago excepcionalmente bien. Tan bien que es una barbaridad. Tan bien que parece real. Se diría, supongo, que tengo el don.”
― Al Álvarez, El Dios Salvaje: Ensayo sobre el suicidio

“Suicide may be a declaration of bankruptcy which passes judgement on a life as one long history of failures. But it is a history which also amounts at least to this one decision which, by its very finality, is not wholly a failure. Some kind of minimal freedom — the freedom to die in one's own way and in one's own time — has been salvaged from the wreck of all those unwanted necessities.”
― A. Alvarez

“In France, despite the derision of Voltaire and Montesquieu, these laws lasted at least until 1770 and, indeed, were twice reinforced in the eighteenth century. The confiscation of the suicide’s property and defamation of his memory finally disappeared with the Revolution; suicide is not mentioned in the new penal code of 1791.5 Not so in England, where the laws concerning the confiscation of property were not changed until 1870, and an unsuccessful suicide could still be sent to prison as late as 1961.d”
― Al Álvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide

“Hence, too, the terminology of the act. ‘Suicide’, which is a Latinate and relatively abstract word, appeared late. The OED dates the first use as 1651; I found the word a little earlier in Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, written in 1635, published in 1642.f But it was still sufficiently rare not to appear”
― Al Álvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide