Suicidality Quotes

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

“The worst part is wondering how you’ll find the strength tomorrow to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much too long, where you’ll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows. And maybe it’s treacherous old age coming on, threatening the worst. Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn’t enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I’ve never been able to kill myself.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Celine

“What people don't understand about depression is how much it hurts. It's like your brain is convinced that it's dying and produces an acid that eats away at you from the inside, until all that's less is a scary hollowness. Your mind fills with dark thoughts; you become convinced that your friends secretly hate you, you're worthless, and then there's no hope. I never got so low as to consider ending it all, but I understand how that can happen to some people. Depression simply hurts too much.”
― Tyler Hamilton

“What if I just want to die?"
"Then I will be sad and disappointed that you cheated yourself out of your chance at existence. Not all of us have that opportunity, you know, to choose life.”
― Megan Bostic, Never Eighteen

“That such a final, tragic, and awful thing is suicide can exist in the midst of remarkable beauty is one of the vastly contradictory and paradoxical aspects of life and art.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament

“I know from my own experience that suicide is not what it seems. Too easy to try to piece together the fragmented life. The spirit torn in bits so that the body follows.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

“With DID patients, if they feel hostility or aggression they take it out on themselves with self-harm... They’re self-destructive and repeatedly suicidal, more so than any other psychological disorder. So that's what's typical – not this wild aggression, or stalking women [or robbery].
- Dr Bethany Brand, on Billy Milligan and Multiple Personality Disorder (DID)”
― Bethany Brand

“As modern neurobiologists point out, the repetition of the traumatic experience in the flashbacks can be itself re-traumatizing; if not life-threatening, it is at least threatening to the chemical structure of the brain and can ultimately lead to deterioration. And this would also seem to explain the high suicide rate of survivor, for example, survivors of Vietnam.”
― Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History

“Not wanting the girls to endure the shame of a crazy mother, I spent my days acting as normal as possible. I walked through life, an actor in a Leave it to Beaver episode, determined to disguise all clues of my real condition until... well, until I could find an appropriate moment to do away with myself." [...]

"Yet even as my depression spiraled into ever more precarious territory, I retained an uncanny ability to disguise my true mental condition from everyone except Tom. He was my sole source of strength and he never stopped encouraging me.”
― Suzie Burke, Wholeness: My Healing Journey from Ritual Abuse

“I will kill myself soon. But until then, how do I tame my pain?”
― Sonali Deraniyagala, Wave

“The worrying thing is that he was well aware of his slide, but didn't seem to want — or be able — to do anything to help it.”
― Rob Jovanovic

“Being suicidal is really tiring. A lot of suicides are so lacking in affect and so lethargic that they aren’t able to kill themselves until their mood improves—spring, for that reason, has the highest rate of what people in the business call “completed” suicides.”
― Charles D'Ambrosio, Loitering: New & Collected Essays

“The issues of antidepressant-associated suicide has become front-page news, the result of an analysis suggesting a link between medication use and suicidal ideation among children, adolescents, a link between medication use and suicidal ideation among children, adolescents, and adults up to age 24 in short term (4 to 16 weeks), placebo-controlled trials of nine newer antidepressant drugs. The data from trials involving more than 4.4(K) patients suggested that the average risk of suicidal thinking or behavior (suicidality) during the first few months of treatment in those receiving antidepressants was 4 percent, twice the placebo risk of 2 percent. No suicides occured in these trials. The analysis also showed no increase in suicide risk among the 25 to 65 age group. Antidepressants reduced suicidality among those over age 65. Following public hearings on the subject, in October 2004, the FDA requested the addition of “black box” warnings—the most serious warning placed on the labeling of a prescription medication—to all antidepressant drugs, old and new.”
― Benjamin James Sadock, Kaplan & Sadock's Synopsis of Psychiatry: Behavioral Sciences/Clinical Psychiatry

“I talked to Alex who has had to live with the possibility of losing me for almost a decade now, and they are terrified. But they tell me they’re not the one who has to live with it. So they can’t say anything, they can’t really tell me to stay. I appreciate that because so many people tell me to stay without knowing what they’re asking, the kind of pain that they’re willing me to just continue being in, and they can’t imagine that this pain has been there since I was little, since before I can remember, always and constant, and my whole life is a calculated distraction to try and get away from it.”
― Akwaeke Emezi, Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir

“Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossiblity of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded; one was alone. There was an embrace in death.”
― Virginia Woolf

“Edwards knew that the constant spending and deliberate time-wasting was taking a toll. 'I know that if I get to the end of this year I'll have no dignity left at all,' he said. 'It's all gone. I live in a big fantasy world... It's sad.' He'd often end the day drinking even more to block out the world and allow him to get to sleep.”
― Rob Jovanovic, A Version of Reason: In Search of Richey Edwards