“Illness, Insanity and Death are the black angels that kept watch over my cradle and accompanied me all my life.”

Edvard Munch

“Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life.

It's a cliché translated into words, but at the time I felt it not as words but as that knot of air inside me. Death exists - in a paperweight, in four red and white balls on a pool table - and we go on living and breathing it into our lungs like fine dust.

Until that time, I had understood death as something entirely separate from and independent of life. The hand of death is bound to take us, I had felt, but until the day it reaches out for us, it leaves us alone. This had seemed to me the simple, logical truth. Life is here, death is over there. I am here, not over there.”

Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami

“this night, walk the dead
in a solitary style
and crash the cemetery gates.
in the dress your husband hates
way down, mark the grave
where the search lights find us
drinking by the mausoleum door
and they found you on the bathroom floor

i miss you, i miss you so far
and the collision of your kiss that made it so hard

back home, off the run
singing songs that make you slit your wrists
it isn't that much fun, staring down a loaded gun
so i won't stop dying, won't stop lying
if you want i'll keep on crying
did you get what you deserve?
is this what you always want me for?”

Cemetary Drive, My Chemical Romance Recommended by Catherine.

“She smiled, dreamily enjoying the thought (rather 'Kareninian' in tone) that her extinction would affect people about as deeply as the abrupt, mysterious, never explained demise of a comic strip in a Sunday paper one had been taking for years.”

Ada, Or Ardor, Vladimir Nabokov

“I shall soon fall prey to rot.
Though it's hard to die, it's good to die;
I shall ask for no one's pity,
And there's no one who would pity me.

With my lyre I won no glory
For my noble family name;
And I die as distant from my people
As the day that I began to live.

Ties of friendship, unions of the heart-
All are broken: from my youth,
Fate has sent me foes implacable,
While my friends all perished in the struggle.

Their prophetic songs were left unfinished,
They fell victim to misfortune, were betrayed
In the bloom of life; and now their portraits watch me
From the walls, reproachfully.”

I Shall Soon Fall Prey to Rot, Nikolay Alekseyevich Nekrasov

“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

“When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were working- bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming- all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth-of-a-second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned- reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone- one mind less, one world less.”

A Hanging, George Orwell

“Here in the bathroom with me are razor blades. Here is iodine to drink. Here are sleeping pills to swallow. You have a choice. Live or die.

Every breath is a choice.

Every minute is a choice.

To be or not to be.

Every time you don't throw yourself down the stairs, that's a choice. Every time you don't crash your car, you re-enlist.”

Survivor, Chuck Palahniuk

“There's always the chance you could die right in the middle of your life story.”

Survivor, Chuck Palahniuk

“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'”

Observation, Dorothy Parker

“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.”

Résumé, Dorothy Parker

“Suicide is just a moment, Lexy told me. This is how she described it to me. For just a moment, it doesn't matter that you've got people who love you and the sun is shining and there's a movie coming out this weekend that you've been dying to see. It hits you all of a sudden that nothing is ever going to be okay, ever, and you kind of dare yourself. You pick up a knife and press it gently to your skin, you look out a nineteenth-story window and you think, I could just do it. I could just do it. And most of the time, you look at the height and you get scared, or you think about the poor people on the sidewalk below - what if there are kids coming home from school and they have to spend the rest of their lives trying to forget this terrible thing you're going to make them see? And the moment's over. You think about how sad it would've been if you never got to see that movie, and you look at your dog and wonder who would've taken care of her if you had gone. And you go back to normal. But you keep it there in your mind. Even if you never take yourself up on it, it gives you a kind of comfort to know that the day is yours to choose. You tuck it away in your brain like sour candy tucked in your cheek, and the puckering memory it leaves behind, the rough pleasure of running your tongue over its strange terrain, is exactly the same.... The day was hers to choose, and perhaps in that treetop moment when she looked down and saw the yard, the world, her life, spread out below her, perhaps she chose to plunge toward it headlong. Perhaps she saw before her a lifetime of walking on the ruined earth and chose instead a single moment in the air.”

The Dogs of Babel, Carolyn Parkhurst

“What's it like, Lexy? You wake up and you feel - what? Heaviness, an ache inside, a weight, yes. A soft crumpling of the flesh. A feeling like all the surfaces iniside you have been rubbed raw. A voice in your head - no, not voices, not like hearing voices, nothing that crazy, just your own inner voice, the one that says 'Turn left at the corner' or 'Don't forget to stop at the post office,' only now it's saying, 'I hate myself.' It's saying, 'I want to die.'”

The Dogs of Babel, Carolyn Parkhurst

“'Is something wrong?' she said.
'Of course there is.'
'You're still alive,' she said.
'Do I deserve to be?'
Is that the question?
And if so...if so...who answers?”

Alive, Pearl Jam

“We go to so much trouble
To postpone the unavoidable
And prolong the pain of being alive.”

Priests/Paramedics, Pedro the Lion Recommended by Melissa.

“It would solve a thousand problems if I rolled the Jeep over an embankment. It's not like I haven't thought about it, you know. On my license, it says I'm an organ donor, but the truth is I'd consider being an organ martyr. I'm sure I'm worth a lot more dead than alive- the sum of the parts equals more than the whole. I wonder who might wind up walking around with my liver, my lungs, even my eyeballs. I wonder what poor asshole would get stuck with whatever it is in me that passes for a heart”

My Sister's Keeper, Jodi Picoult

“We all have a dark side, to say the least
And dealing in death is the nature of the beast.”

The Dogs of War, Pink Floyd

“Dying
Is an art, like everything else,
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.”

Lady Lazarus, Sylvia Plath

“I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus
With tigery stripes, and a face on it
Round as the moon, to stare up.
I want to be looking at them when they come
Picking among the dumb minerals, the roots.
I see them already-the pale, star-distance faces.
Now they are nothing, they are not even babies.
I imagine them without fathers or mothers, like the first gods.
They will wonder if I was important.”

Last Words, Sylvia Plath

“Sad Hamlet, with a knife?
Where do you stash your life?”

Stopped Dead, Sylvia Plath

“One night she hid the pink cotton scarf from her raincoat in the pillowcase when the nurse came around to lock up her drawers and closets for the night. In the dark she had made a loop and tried to pull it tight around her throat. But always just as the air stopped coming and she felt the rushing grow louder in her ears, her hands would slacken and let go, and she would lie there panting for breath, cursing the dumb instinct in her body that fought to go on living.”

Tongues of Stone, Sylvia Plath Recommended by kalee.

“I can't deceive myself out of the bare stark realization that no matter how enthusiastic you are, no matter how sure that character is fate, nothing is real, past or future. And if you have no past or future, which, after all, is all that the present is made of, why then you may as well dispose of the empty shell of present and commit suicide.”

Unabridged Journals, Sylvia Plath

“Pretty soon, the only doubt in my mind was the precise time and method of committing suicide. The only alternative I could see was an eternity of hell for the rest of my life in a mental hospital, and I was going to use my last ounce of free choice and choose a quick clean ending.”

unsent letter to Eddie Cohen, Sylvia Plath

“I could not love except where Death
Was mingling his with Beauty's breath ?”

Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poem, Edgar Allan Poe

“Ye who read are still among the living; but I who write shall have long since gone my way into the region of shadows.”

Shadow, Edgar Allan Poe