Suicide Quotes

I didn't want to wake up. I was having a much better time asleep. And that's really sad. It was almost like a reverse nightmare, like when you wake up from a nightmare you're so relieved. I woke up into a nightmare.

~ Ned Vizzini

The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

~ David Foster Wallace

I can't eat and I can't sleep. I'm not doing well in terms of being a functional human, you know?

~ Ned Vizzini

I waste at least an hour every day lying in bed. Then I waste time pacing. I waste time thinking. I waste time being quiet and not saying anything because I'm afraid I'll stutter.

~ Ned Vizzini

Killing oneself is, anyway, a misnomer. We don't kill ourselves. We are simply defeated by the long, hard struggle to stay alive. When somebody dies after a long illness, people are apt to say, with a note of approval, He fought so hard. And they are inclined to think, about a suicide, that no fight was involved, that somebody simply gave up. This is quite wrong.

~ Sally Brampton

Some people are just not meant to be in this world. It's just too much for them.

~ Phoebe Stone

I'm fine. Well, I'm not fine - I'm here.Is there something wrong with that?Absolutely.

~ Ned Vizzini

I have had to experience so much stupidity, so many vices, so much error, so much nausea, disillusionment and sorrow, just in order to become a child again and begin anew. I had to experience despair, I had to sink to the greatest mental depths, to thoughts of suicide, in order to experience grace.

~ Hermann Hesse

In the meantime, I could withdraw to my room, could hide and sleep as if I were dead

~ Elizabeth Wurtzel

(...) Since I was a kid.Which you refer to as 'back when you were happy.'Right.

~ Ned Vizzini

A phenomenon that a number of people have noted while in deep depression is the sense of being accompanied by a second self — a wraithlike observer who, not sharing the dementia of his double, is able to watch with dispassionate curiosity as his companion struggles against the oncoming disaster, or decides to embrace it. There is a theatrical quality about all this, and during the next several days, as I went about stolidly preparing for extinction, I couldn't shake off a sense of melodrama — a melodrama in which I, the victim-to-be of self-murder, was both the solitary actor and lone member of the audience.

~ William Styron

I'm trying to let him know what I'm about to do.I'm hoping he can save me, even though I realize he can't.

~ Matthew Quick

After all, suicide is contagious.

~ Suzanne Young

People try to say suicide is the most cowardly act a man could ever commit. I don't think that's true at all. What's cowardly is treating a man so badly that he wants to commit suicide.

~ Tommy Tran

Maybe all you need to pull you back form the ledge is to know someone would miss you if you fell.

~ Leah Raeder

When the black thing was at its worst, when the illicit cocktails and the ten-mile runs stopped working, I would feel numb as if dead to the world. I moved unconsciously, with heavy limbs, like a zombie from a horror film. I felt a pain so fierce and persistent deep inside me, I was tempted to take the chopping knife in the kitchen and cut the black thing out I would lie on my bed staring at the ceiling thinking about that knife and using all my limited powers of self-control to stop myself from going downstairs to get it.

~ Alice Jamieson

Everyone's a liar. Everyone I've ever known.

~ Julie Anne Peters

I don't- I shake my head. (...) What? What were you going to say? This is another trick of shrinks. They never let you stop in midthought. If you open your mouth, they want to know exactly what you had the intention of saying.

~ Ned Vizzini

I can feel the hurt. There's something good about it. Mostly it makes me stop remembering.

~ Albert Borris

Anyone who's happy in a world this fucked-up has some serious psychological issues. You think I'm crazy because I see things as they are. You'd rather put on Disneyland goggles and watch TV and pretend it's fine. It's not crazy if I see monsters when I live in a fucking nightmare.

~ Leah Raeder

Owen: depressed people don't have the energy to kill themselves. that's what mr clark saidOwen: he said it's not when people are depressed that you have to worry about them. it's when someone depressed suddenly has energy. that means they decided to kill themselves. to actOwen: and that makes them happy

~ Albert Borris

The ledge isn't even wide enough for my feet to fit on completely. I hang onto the rail tightly and do a Casper does...leaning out slowly over the water. Like this, there is no safety. No rail to catch me if I slip. I'm almost flying. Between me and death, there is...nothing. Nothing in the way but my own decision to hang on.

~ Kelley York

The sun stopped shining for me is all.

~ Nina Lacour

What people never understand is that depression isn't about the outside, it's about the inside.

~ Jasmine Warga

He did not care what the end would be, and in his lucid moments overvalued his indifference. The danger, when not seen, has the imperfect vagueness of human thought. The fear grows shadowy; and Imagination, the enemy of men, the father of all terrors, unstimulated, sinks to rest in the dullness of exhausted emotion.

~ Joseph Conrad

He stepped off the pavement like a man jumping off a bridge, as calm as a swimmer with an ocean out below. Lucy had known what he was going to do the instant their eyes met. She'd know what he intended because she would have done the very same thing if she'd had his courage. Nothing was going to break his fall.

~ Alice Hoffman

I looked in the mirror and realized that I was already dead. I let you kill me one piece at a time, starting when I was, what? Eight years old? Nine? You killed yourself and then you came after us.

~ Laurie Halse Anderson

Gunner shook his head; he wasn't in the mood. He stared down at his bottle as he spoke. Yeah, and what if I do go after it and what if I find no one, and I'm alone for the next sixty years? What then? Huh? Friends and family will get married. I'll be stuck buying gifts. Years pass: children, birthday parties. At dinner parties, I'll be odd man out, forcing people to arrange five chairs around a table instead of four or six. Or, okay, let's say maybe twenty years down the line I meet someone nice and I've already given up on ever finding true love. Let's say the girl is a few pounds overweight, has fizzy hair and an annoying laugh, but at this point, I'm also a few pounds overweight and my hair is thinning and my laughter is annoying. Maybe then the two of us get married, and both our groups of friends will say, 'See I told you that you'd find true love. It just took a while.' And we'll smile, but we'll both know it's a lie--

~ Michael Anthony

It’s a little-known secret, and it should probably stay that way: attempting suicide usually jump-starts your brain chemistry. There must be something about taking all those pills that either floods the brain sufficiently or depletes it so completely that balance is restored. Whatever the mechanism, the result is that you emerge on the other side of the attempt with an awareness of what it means to be alive. Simple acts seem miraculous: you can stand transfixed for hours just watching the wind ruffle the tiny hairs along the top of your arm. And always, with every sensation, is the knowledge that you must have survived for a reason. You just can’t doubt it anymore. You must have a purpose, or you would have died. You have the rest of your life to discover what that purpose is. And you can’t wait to start looking.

~ Terri Cheney

You create your own reality

~ Allison Scott

If I weren't so depressed, I'd kill myself.

~ Steve Kluger

In the wasteland of metro Boston, at thirteen, fourteen, his big dream had been of a gun to his own head, putting him out of his misery—a misery that by sophomore year of college was indistinguishable from everybody else's.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

My heart is sinking and my chest physically aches from the heavy sadness that it carries within.

~ Shannon Perry

I realise now that the pain Kevin felt - that night, and for nearly eighteen months beforehand, since his suicide attempt - was no less real, no less urgent, than a heart attach, a stroke, a seizure. Than the sensation of running too hard or running too fast, keeling over, grasping for air. Wishing for something to fill your lungs - to rush in and then revive you - except nothing ever does, and maybe nothing ever can.It is unpleasant, of course, to sympathise with suicide. It is unpleasant to believe in a reality in which death is the only option. And it is problematic, certainly, to compare suicide to running, to cardiac arrest, to terminal cancer. But this is precisely the problem: There is no fair parallel that can be drawn between those who felt the dark pull of suicide and those who never have.

~ Amy E. Butcher

It was only later, replaying the scene in her mind again and again, that she began to believe it was the expression of a man who was methodically unplugging himself from reality, one cord at a time. The face of a man who was heading out of the blue and into the black.

~ Stephen King

The tedium of existence and feeling imprisoned in a deplorable job can cause a person to consider the most expedient escape route from suffering including flirting with suicide. Fernando Pessoa wrote in “The Book of Disquiet” of his own feelings of uneasiness and sense of discouragement. “I suffer from life and from other people. I cannot look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten, and lost, with no connection to anything useful or real – only then do I find myself comforted.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

He was obsessed with obituaries. She'd never read them before, he couldn't believe it, to him it was like someone who'd never read the funnies...Michael always wanted to know what they died of- accidental gunshot wounds, overdose, cancer. 'Was it suicide?' That's what he really wanted to know.

~ Janet Fitch

Those drugs were either going to bring me nirvana or they were going to kill me. I was sure of it. And I was comfortable with it.

~ Joss Sheldon

In my room, in the dark, I understood what I never had before, what no one else seemed to. I understood how a boy could go into the woods with a bullet and a gun and not come out. That there was no conspiracy, no evil influences or secret rituals; that sometimes there was only pain and the need to make it stop.

~ Robin Wasserman

He wrote arguments for and against life; he began to think the slowest and most painful form of suicide was living, running the whole decathlon of suffering, no breather or bottled water. Fear of dying was irrational. Death was utilitarian. Decrease in net resource consumption and planetary suffering. Increase in net comedy. There was no afterlife but there was a right-before-death, and medical research said it was loopy and nice, all white lights and gentle voices. With booze it wasn't even scary. Some people with terrible lives didn't kill themselves, but that didn't mean they shouldn't. Most people weren't alive and didn't mind. You couldn't regret it.

~ Tony Tulathimutte