By Category: Suicide

“I have wished you dead and myself dead.
How could it be otherwise.
I have broken into you like a burglar.
And you've set your dogs on me.
And a pile of broken sticks.
A child could kick.
I have climbed you like a monument, gasping,
For the exercise and the view,
And leaned over the railing at the top...
Strong and warm, the summer wind.”

-I Have Wished You Dead, Alicia Ostriker

~

“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

~

“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

~

“Sometimes the insane and the contrarians and the ones who are closest to suicide are the most valuable people society has. They may be precursors of social change. They've taken the burdens of the culture onto themselves, and in their struggle to solve their own problems they're solving problems for the culture as well.”

-Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals, Robert M. Pirsig

~

“It was my last act of love.”

-after her first major suicide attempt, Sylvia Plath

~

“The woman is perfected.
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment.”

-Edge, Sylvia Plath

~

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

-Stopped Dead, Sylvia Plath

~

“It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get at.”

-The Bell Jar, 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

~

“My best friend would be the man who gave me a pistol that I might blow out my brains.”

-on his deathbed, Edgar Allan Poe

~

“They can rule the world while they can persuade us
our pain belongs in some order.
Is death by famine worse than death by suicide,
than a life of famine and suicide ...?”

-Power. Hunger., Adrienne Rich

~

“World, if the razor slips. And I kill myself, then who would piss you off everyday?”

-Tony Rodgers

~

“War going on inside my head. I can't get to sleep. I'd rather be dead. Don't try to tell me, I can't hear your words. I'm not long for this world.”

-Henry Rollins

Recommended by Tricia.

~

“I don't know a lot about her
But she, she knew a lot about me
Her family seemed to love her
If what they say is true
Her friends all share the good times man
That girl has love
That girl has I, I didn't have a clue then
That a kiss would change my whole life again
She walked into my room
When I was all alone
She told me I would date her from September till December
She doesn't know things will never be the same again
She'll always be seventeen
That girl has love
She kept all the pain inside
Now she has got nothing to hide
At such a young age she took her own life
Now she's seeing things that come in our dreams at night
She's a dreamer
That was too real to ever be fake
That was too srong to ever be forgotten
That girl has love.”

-That Girl Has Love, Rooney

Recommended by Bonna.

~

“I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.”

-Suicide In The Trenches, Siegfried Sasson

~

“They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice; that only a madman could be guilty of it, and other insipidities of the same kind; or else they make the nonsensical remark that suicide is wrong, when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.”

-On Suicide, Arthur Schopenhauer

~

“Any writer, any artist, I'm sure is obsessed with death, a prerequisite for life.”

-Anne Sexton

~

“We talked of death, and this was life to us.”

-describing friendship with Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton

~

“My death from the wrists,
two name tags,
blood worn like a corsage
to bloom
one on the left and one on the right.”

-Menstruation At 40, Anne Sexton

~

“I see now that we store him up
year after year, old suicides
and I know at the news of your death,
a terrible taste for it, like salt.”

-Sylvia's Death, Anne Sexton

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