Quotes about Suicide

if love is suicide.......    than kill me slowly..

If I heard a girl crying help
I would go to save her;
But you hardly ever hear those words.
Dear children, you must try to say
Something when you are in need.
Don't confuse hunger with greed;
And don't wait until you are dead.

The Earth thirsts for our blood, but we need not give it so readily.

Life without meaning
cannot be borne.
We find a mission
to which we're sworn
--or answer the call
of Death's dark horn.
Without a gleaning
of purpose in life,
we have no vision,
we live in strife,
--or let blood fall
on a suicide knife.

And I had wondered then if people really died because of a reason.
Or were they just bored of their lives and needed a reason to end it.
Though I never would want to commit suicide.

 Erosion, desertification, and pollution have become our lot.  It is a weird form of suicide, for we are bleeding our planet to death.

Here is the statement I want to make: if I am required to pay for your barbaric war, I choose not to live in your world.  I refuse to finance the mass murder of innocent civilians, who did nothing to threaten our country... If one death can atone for anything, in any small way, to say to the world: I apologize for what we have done to you, I am ashamed for the mayhem and turmoil caused by my country.

Without fear I go now to God.  Your future is what you will choose today.

The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.

Hold on to what is good even if it is a handful of earth.
Hold on to what you believe even if it is a tree which stands by itself.
Hold on to what you must do even if it is a long way from here.
Hold on to life even when it is easier letting go.
Hold on to my hand even when I have gone away from you.

There was something heavy and black and sticky about it [a friend's suicide], a kind of terrible cloud. I felt sick and like fainting underneath it while I cleaned the apartment bare, like the winter clearing the branches of the trees and the earth with its terrible wind, leaving nothing behind. When someone new moved in with uncrushed dreams, then the spring would return to that apartment.

But as for my friend's widow, she would move on with the winter, following it like a gypsy wherever its cold wind blew, and its emptiness beckoned.

It was also the beginning of her end.

At that time, some people called my friend a coward. They said he had lacked the courage to face up to his problems, and to deal with the trials life had put in his path. I, always reluctant to speak ill of the dead, did not join in this chorus of condemnation. Was it superstition, (the vengeance of ghosts, and need to bind the threatening figure with love) or some important form of respect?

In all events, my friend had proven his courage other times. Did his courage break, or is it only that there are different forms of courage for different challenges, and that we may respond courageously to some situations and not to others? (Perhaps it is like in Orwell's 1984, where there is that room of horrors that holds the one thing we fear most, different for each of us. To one a rat, to one a bullet, to one a cliff with torrents of water rushing beneath, to one a disease: our personal weak spot, the one "special" thing that will break us, even if we are made of iron.)

The question bothered me a long time. I felt a loyalty to my friend's memory, a desire not to "sell him short," and remember him as a coward; yet also, the suicide seemed such a tragedy, and there was a heavy darkness about it, not a bright, liberating shining.

I concluded that I owed my friend a moratorium from judgment. There was both bravery and perhaps a lack of it in his action. The physical act of actually getting a gun, loading it, setting himself up with it, and pulling the trigger, which I went over in my mind again and again in my effort to understand him, did require physical courage - just like the act of jumping off the Empire State Building, which someone else I knew much more peripherally, did.

But what of the courage of facing life's challenges?

I concluded that for him, bred to a different idea of courage, it was not easy to find valor in living out a humiliating demeaning life with no apparent light at the end of the tunnel. ... I finally concluded that my friend was not a coward; that he simply had not reached the perspective on life that could have enabled him to carry on. This is why I feel that spiritual understanding, and connection with spirit, is so crucial to survive in this world, because raw courage may not be enough. The proudest lion who would keep on fighting if he was filled with arrows, might be killed by a mere shadow. There comes a dark time, a confusing time, when only insight can bring courage, and that is why the spiritual path is so crucial to any sensitive being on this planet. ...

Could it be, whenever we face a life crisis, as though our soul was seeking to cross a deep and difficult river in its path, and that we must keep on wandering along the shore, for the rest of time, until we finally find a place to cross, and dare to make the crossing? If so, we might as well do it now. If it's painful now, why stay stuck in it, why keep perpetuating it for eternity? Certainly, things we do in this life can haunt us and imprison us within this life. ...As the saying goes, no matter how hard you try, "you can't run away from yourself" -which may be what we're doing whenever we run away from a hardship life has ‘"forced" upon us. Therefore, I believe that we must struggle with all our heart and insight, to go on, and never take our own lives.

...Suicide is only rescheduling the ordeal for another time-and if we cannot pass through the hardship now, what is it that will make us be able to pass through it in the future? On the contrary, the more deeply the precedent of collapsing is entrenched within our souls, the harder it is likely to become to break through the barrier in the future. It is as though our souls were bleeding. Better to fight now, before we lose more blood!

And yet one more way to think about suicide: Look at a part of yourself that was beautiful, a childhood photograph, a picture that you drew, something that evokes tenderness before the self-hate set in. Something that evokes that maternal/paternal instinct that has kept our human race from dying out - the heart's pull towards that which is helpless and beautifully fresh, whether we have fathered/mothered it or not. Accept that child into your care, like an orphan...given to you to love, even if no one else does, to care for, to be a guardian of. Imagine yourself carrying that fragile, beautiful being with you along a hard, dark road. Can you see yourself saying, "Enough!", and just throwing that child off your back or out of your arms, down onto the hard ground at the side of the road, leaving it behind in the cold to die? Of course not!...

I don't know when the idea of suicide first occurred to me. In some ways, it had been in the back of my mind for years. Yet, oddly, I would never have thought of it as an option. It was the perceived lack of options-the final, unacceptable solution to a grave and insoluble dilemma. I had always thought of it in the same way: If all else fails, if I have nowhere else to turn, I can do this.

Anyone desperate enough for suicide... should be desperate enough to go to creative extremes to solve problems: elope at midnight, stow away on the boat to New Zealand and start over, do what they always wanted to do but were afraid to try.

We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out windows, or drown themselves, or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us are slowly devoured by some disease, or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds & expectations, to burst open & give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) know these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning, we hope, more than anything for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so...There she is with another hour before her.

(Is Suicide a Choice?)  No. Choice implies that a suicidal person can reasonably look at alternatives and select among them. If they could rationally choose, it would not be suicide. Suicide happens when all other alternatives are exhausted -- when no other choices are seen.

What lingered after them was not life, but the most trivial list of mundane facts: a clock ticking on a wall, a room dim at noon, and the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself...  We began the impossible process of trying to forget them...  But we have never found an answer. It didn't matter in the end how old they were... but only that we had loved them... and that they hadn't heard us calling.  Still do not hear us calling them from out of those rooms... where they went to be alone for all time... and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.

Envy is ignorance. Imitation is suicide.

Last Words in a Suicide note: I feel certain that I'm going mad again. I feel we can't go thru another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices.

Allport, Gordon W., in his preface to Man's Search for Meaning: "WHY DO YOU NOT COMMIT SUICIDE?" Dr. Frankl asks his patients. . . . in one life there is love for one's children to tie to; in another life, a talent to be used; in a third, perhaps only lingering memories worth preserving. . . . As a long-time prisoner in bestial concentration camps he [Viktor Frankl] found himself stripped to naked existence. His father, mother, brother, and his wife died in camps or were sent to gas ovens, so that, excepting for his sister, his entire family perished in these camps. How could he - every possession lost, every value destroyed, suffering from hunger, cold and brutality, hourly expecting extermination - how could he find life worth preserving?

They tried to get me - I got them first! [Suicide.]

Prosperity always commits suicide; resurrection is born of depression.

Suicide playing Russian roulette. Don't worry, it's not loaded.

Nowadays not even a suicide kills himself in desperation. Before taking the step he deliberates so long and so carefully that he literally chokes with thought. It is even questionable whether he ought to be called a suicide, since it is really thought which takes his life. He does not die with deliberation but from deliberation.

Suicide note. And so I leave this world, where the heart must either break or turn to lead.

[Suicide note to her lover who left her.] When I am dead, and over me bright April Shakes out her rain drenched hair, Tho you should lean above me broken hearted, I shall not care. For I shall have peace. As leafey trees are peaceful When rain bends down the bough. And I shall be more silent and cold hearted Than you are now.

There never was a democracy that did not commit suicide.

My husband and I didn't sign a prenuptial agreement. We signed a mutual suicide pact.

All fled-all done, so lift me on the pyre; The feast is over, and the lamps expire. [Suicide note.]

Nobody ever committed suicide while reading a good book, but many have while trying to write one.

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

Imitation is suicide.