Jay Ivey > Jay's Quotes

“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

“Résumé
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.”
― Dorothy Parker, Enough Rope

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Why did she do it? Nobody dared to ask. Because - what courage! Who had the courage to burn herself? Twenty aspirin, a little slit alongside the veins of the arm, maybe even a bad half hour standing on a roof: We've all had those. And somewhat more dangerous things, like putting a gun in your mouth. But you put it there, you taste it, it's cold and greasy, your finger is on the trigger, and you find that a whole world lies between this moment and the moment you've been planning, when you'll pull the trigger. That world defeats you. You put the gun back in the drawer. You'll have to find another way.

What was that moment like for her? The moment she lit the match. Had she already tried roofs and guns and aspirins? Or was it just an inspiration?

I had an inspiration once. I woke up one morning and I knew that today I had to swallow fifty aspirin. It was my task: my job for the day. I lined them up on my desk and took them one by one, counting. But it's not the same as what she did. I could have stopped, at ten, or at thirty. And I could have done what I did do, which was go onto the street and faint. Fifty aspirin is a lot of aspirin, but going onto the street and fainting is like putting the gun back in the drawer.

She lit the match.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“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

“It was easy enough to kill yourself in a fit of despair. It was easy enough to play the martyr. It was harder to do nothing. To endure your life. To wait.”
― Erica Jong, Fear of Flying

“The language of love letters is the same as suicide notes.”
― Courtney Love, Dirty Blonde: The Diaries of Courtney Love

“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

“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 know, too, that death is the only god who comes when you call.”
― Roger Zelazny, Frost & Fire

“Suicide only really frightens those who are never tempted by it and never will be, for its darkness only welcomes those who are predestined to it.”
― Georges Bernanos, Mouchette

“Life’s greatest gift is the freedom it leaves you to step out of it whenever you choose.”
― André Breton, Anthology of Black Humor

“It is tempting when looking at the life of anyone who has committed suicide to read into the decision to die a vastly complex web of reasons; and, of course, such complexity is warranted. No one illness or event causes suicide; and certainly no one knows all, or perhaps even most, of the motivations behind the killing of the self. But psychopathology is almost always there, and its deadliness is fierce. Love, success, and friendship are not always enough to counter the pain and destructiveness of severe mental illness ”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide

“I never see that prettiest thing-
A cherry bough gone white with Spring-
But what I think, "How gay 'twould be
To hang me from a flowering tree.”
― Dorothy Parker, Not So Deep As A Well: Collected Poems

“My best friend is dead, and I could have saved her. It’s so wrong so completely and painfully wrong, that I walked through my front door tonight smiling.”
― Nina LaCour, Hold Still

“I thought about suicide all the time, but it seemed toomuch effort, swallowing all those pills or jumping off things. If I'd lived out in the country I would have found a quiet stretch of railway track, and lain on it, fallen asleep, so that I would never have known when my last moment came. In London, the minimum tube fare had gone up so much that even to get near the line cost a fortune. Suicide seemed an extravagance I couldn't afford. People never leave you alone, either; I knew that if I'd tried to lie down on the line, any number of commuters would have pulled me off again, so that I didn't delay their train.
There must have been murderers out there who wanted to kill, with no way of finding those who wanted to be dead. If there had been some way of contacting them, a date-with-death line, I would have called them to set up a meeting. The current ways of death seemed too haphazard; it was all left up to chance. Had Chance come up, tapped me on the shoulder, said "Oi, you - long black tunnel, white light, off you go," I wouldn't have complained.
It was like having frostbite all over - feeling numb and in pain at the same time.”
― Helena Dela, The Count

“Suicide is not a blot on anyone’s name; it is a tragedy ”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide

“The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Depression is a painfully slow, crashing death. Mania is the other extreme, a wild roller coaster run off its tracks, an eight ball of coke cut with speed. It's fun and it's frightening as hell. Some patients - bipolar type I - experience both extremes; other - bipolar type II - suffer depression almost exclusively. But the "mixed state," the mercurial churning of both high and low, is the most dangerous, the most deadly. Suicide too often results from the impulsive nature and physical speed of psychotic mania coupled with depression's paranoid self-loathing.”
― David Lovelace, Scattershot: My Bipolar Family

“This is what I want so don't be sad.”
― Nina LaCour, Hold Still

“Dear Anyone Who Finds This, Do not blame the drugs.”
― Lynda Barry, Cruddy

“The awareness of the damage done by severe mental illness—to the individual himself and to others—and fears that it may return again play a decisive role in many suicides ”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide

“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.”
― Jay Asher, Thirteen Reasons Why

“The debate was wearing me out. Once you've posed that question, it won't go away. I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't. Anything I thought or did was immediately drawn into the debate. Made a stupid remark—why not kill myself? Missed the bus—better put an end to it all. Even the good got in there. I liked that movie—maybe I shouldn’t kill myself.”
― Susanna Kaysen

“Looking at suicide—the sheer numbers, the pain leading up to it, and the suffering left behind—is harrowing. For every moment of exuberance in the science, or in the success of governments, there is a matching and terrible reality of the deaths themselves: the young deaths, the violent deaths, the unnecessary deaths ”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide