Tannika > Tannika's Quotes

“A prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages.”
― Tennessee Williams, Stairs to the Roof

“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

“That was the thing. You never got used to it, the idea of someone being gone. Just when you think it's reconciled, accepted, someone points it out to you, and it just hits you all over again, that shocking.”
― Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever

“I was waiting for the longest time, she said. I thought you forgot.

It is hard to forget, I said, when there is such an empty space when you are gone.”
― Brian Andreas, Story People

“In those pamphlets that they give at mental health centers where they list the ten or so symptoms that would indicate a clinical depression, 'suicide threats' or even simple 'talk of suicide' is considered cause for concern. I guess the point is that what's just talk one day may become a real activity the next. So perhaps after years of walking around with these germinal feelings, these raw thoughts, these scattered moments of saying I wish I were dead, eventually I too, sooner or later, would succumb to the death urge. In the meantime, I could withdraw to my room, could hide and sleep as if I were dead.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“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

“Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“It was a spring day, the sort that gives people hope: all soft winds and delicate smells of
warm earth. Suicide weather.”
― Susanna Kaysen

“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

“There is no refuge from confession but suicide; and suicide is confession”
― Daniel Webster

“She wanted out of that decorating scheme.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“Manic-depression distorts moods and thoughts, incites dreadful behaviors, destroys the basis of rational thought, and too often erodes the desire and will to live. It is an illness that is biological in its origins, yet one that feels psychological in the experience of it, an illness that is unique in conferring advantage and pleasure, yet one that brings in its wake almost unendurable suffering and, not infrequently, suicide.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

“The man who kills a man kills a man.
The man who kills himself kills all men.
As far as he is concerned, he wipes out the world.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“As someone very sagely said during the parricide trials of the Menendez Brothers: anytime your kids kill you, you are at least partly to blame.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“Depression is about as close as you get to somewhere between dead and alive, and it's the worst.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“It doesn’t matter how many years go by, how much therapy I embark on, how much I try to achieve that elusive thing known as perspective, which is supposed to put all past wrongs into their rightful and diminished place, that happy place where all the talk is of lessons learned and inner peace. No one will ever understand the potency of my memories, which are so solid and vivid that I don’t need a psychiatrist to tell me they are driving me crazy. My subconscious has not buried them, my superego has not restrained them. They are front and center, they are going on right now.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“homesickness is just a state of mind for me. i'm always missing someone or someplace or something, i'm always trying to get back to some imaginary somewhere. my life has been one long longing.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“That’s the thing I want to make clear about depression: It’s got nothing at all to do with life. In the course of life, there is sadness and pain and sorror, all of which, in their right time and season, are normal—unpleasant, but normal. Depression is an altogether different zone because it involves a complete absence: absence of affect, absence of feeling, absence of response, absence of interest. The pain you feel in the course of a major clinical depression is an attempt on nature’s part (nature, after all, abhors a vacuum) to fill up the empty space. But for all intents and purposes, the deeply depressed are just the walking, waking dead.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“The measure of mindfulness, the touchstone for sanity in this society, is our level of productivity, our attention to responsibility, our ability to plain and simple hold down a job. ”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“Cheat your landlord if you can -- and must -- but do not try to shortchange the Muse.”
― William S. Burroughs

“Do you know what I think, Potter?' said Snape, very quietly. "I think that you are a liar and a cheat and that you deserve detention with me every Saturday until the end of term. What do you think, Potter?”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

“I covet truth; beauty is unripe childhood's cheat; I leave it behind with the games of youth.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson's Prose and Poetry

“Do not pray for an easy life, pray for the strength to endure a difficult one”
― Bruce Lee

“I’m not in this world to live up to your expectations and you’re not in this world to live up to mine.”
― Bruce Lee

“It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”
― Lewis Carroll

“She generally gave herself very good advice, (though she very seldom followed it).”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass

“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass

“If you drink much from a bottle marked 'poison' it is certain to disagree with you sooner or later.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories