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If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again. Suicide will be for me only one means of violently reconquering myself, of brutally invading my being, of anticipating the unpredictable approaches of God. By suicide, I reintroduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will.
-Antonin Artaud
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Not a single star will be left in the night. The night will not be left. I will die and, with me, the weight of the intolerable universe. I shall erase the pyramids, the medallions, the continents and faces. I shall erase the accumulated past. I shall make dust of history, dust of dust. Now I am looking on the final sunset. I am hearing the last bird. I bequeath nothingness to no one.
-Jorge Luis Borges
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If you must commit suicide... always contrive to do it as decorously as possible; the decencies, whether of life or of death, should never be lost sight of.
-George Borrow
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One said of suicide, As long as one has brains one should not blow them out. And another answered, But when one has ceased to have them, too often one cannot.
-Francis H. Bradley
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Oh! snatched away in beauty's bloom,
On thee shall press no ponderous tomb;
But on thy turf shall roses rear
Their leaves, the earliest of the year.
-Lord (George Gordon) Byron
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Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest--whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories--comes afterward. These are games; one must first answer.
-Albert Camus
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It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
-E. M. Cioran
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The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.
-E. M. Cioran
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Suicide sometimes proceeds from cowardice, but not always; for cowardice sometimes prevents it; since as many live because they are afraid to die, as die because they are afraid to live.
-Charles Caleb Colton
The Lacon, 1829
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There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbors will say.
-Cyril Connolly
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Whenever any affliction assails me, I have the keys of my prison in mine own hand, and no remedy presents it selfe so soone to my heart, as mine own sword. Often meditation of this hath wonne me to a charitable interpretation of their action, who dy so: and provoked me a little to watch and exagitate their reasons, which pronounce so peremptory judgments upon them.
-John Donne
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Each victim of suicide gives his act a personal stamp which expresses his temperament, the special conditions in which he is involved, and which, consequently, cannot be explained by the social and general causes of the phenomenon.
-Emile Durkheim
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The prevalence of suicide, without doubt, is a test of height in civilization; it means that the population is winding up its nervous and intellectual system to the utmost point of tension and that sometimes it snaps.
-Havelock Ellis
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Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn't had an audience, and lines to speak?
-Jean Genet
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Human life consists in mutual service. No grief, pain, misfortune, or broken heart, is excuse for cutting off one's life while any power of service remains. But when all usefulness is over, when one is assured of an unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one.
-Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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However great a man's fear of life, suicide remains the courageous act, the clear-headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has judged by the laws of chance -- so many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival. But think how a sense of survival must clamor to be heard at the last moment, what excuses it must present of a totally unscientific nature.
-Graham Greene
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Sometimes I wonder if suicides aren't in fact sad guardians of the meaning of life.
-Vaclav Havel
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Suicide is not abominable because God prohibits it; God prohibits it because it is abominable.
-Immanuel Kant
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Not even a suicide does away with himself out of desperation, he considers the act so long and so deliberately, that he kills himself with thinking -- one could barely call it suicide since it is thinking which takes his life. He does not kill himself with deliberation but rather kills himself because of deliberation.
-Soren Kierkegaard
The Present Age, 1846
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If you are of the opinion that the contemplation of suicide is sufficient evidence of a poetic nature, do not forget that actions speak louder than words.
-Fran Lebowitz
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Here take back the stuff that I am, nature, knead it back into the dough of being, make of me a bush, a cloud, whatever you will, even a man, only no longer make me.
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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It is the part of cowardliness, and not of virtue, to seek to squat itself in some hollow lurking hole, or to hide herself under some massive tomb, thereby to shun the strokes of fortune.
-Michel de Montaigne
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I don't break the law* made for crooks, when I take away my own property - thus I am not obliged to conform to the law made for murderers when I deprive myself of my own life.
*(referring to Thou Shalt Not Kill)
-Michel de Montaigne
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And one of his partners asked Has he vertigo? and the other glanced out and down and said Oh no, only about ten feet more.
-Ogden Nash
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It is always consoling to think of suicide: in that way one gets through many a bad night.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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Books about Suicide
