Dana > Dana's Quotes

“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.”
― David Foster Wallace

“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.”
― Tiffanie DeBartolo, How to Kill a Rock Star

“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.”
― Sally Brampton, Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression

“Everything...affects everything”
― Jay Asher, Thirteen Reasons Why

“The only difference between a suicide and a martyrdom really is the amount of press coverage.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“It is not seen as insane when a fighter, under an attack that will inevitable 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?”
― Emilie Autumn, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls

“It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“Let them think what they liked, but I didn't mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank -- but that's not the same thing.”
― Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer and other stories

“Some people are just not meant to be in this world. It's just too much for them.”
― Phoebe Stone, The Boy on Cinnamon Street

“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.”
― Ned Vizzini, It's Kind of a Funny Story

“Suicide is man's way of telling God, 'You can't fire me - I quit!”
― Bill Maher

“I'm the girl nobody knows until she commits suicide. Then suddenly everyone had a class with her.”
― Tom Leveen, Party

“The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.”
― David Foster Wallace

“A book is a suicide postponed.”
― Cioran

“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.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“We cannot tear out a single page of our life, but we can throw the whole book in the fire.”
― George Sand, Mauprat

“I went down to the river,
I set down on the bank.
I tried to think but couldn't,
So I jumped in and sank.”
― Langston Hughes

“I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't.”
― Susanna Kaysen

“My room is so quiet and empty it hurts.”
― Nina LaCour, Hold Still

“Nothing in my life has ever made me want to commit suicide more than people's reaction to my trying to commit suicide.”
― Emilie Autumn, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls

“The bravest thing I ever did was continuing my life when I wanted to die.”
― Juliette Lewis

“People rarely bring flowers to a suicide.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“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.”
― Jeannette Walls

“When you're young and healthy you can plan on Monday to commit suicide, and by Wednesday you're laughing again.”
― Marilyn Monroe, My Story

“If wild my breast and sore my pride,
I bask in dreams of suicide,
If cool my heart and high my head
I think 'How lucky are the dead.”
― Dorothy Parker, The Complete Poems of Dorothy Parker

“Actually, it was only part of myself I wanted to kill: the part that wanted to kill herself, that dragged me into the suicide debate and made every window, kitchen implement, and subway station a rehearsal for tragedy.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“It is good to be a cynic — it is better to be a contented cat — and it is best not to exist at all.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Collected Essays 5: Philosophy, Autobiography and Miscellany

“The trouble about jumping was that if you didn't pick the right number of storeys, you might still be alive when you hit bottom.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“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.”
― Clifford Odets

“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.”
― Shaun David Hutchinson, We Are the Ants