#suicide

If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most. Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic. ↗

— Walker Percy

#poetry #reentry-problems #suicide #art

So it's back once more, back up the slope. Why do they always ruin my rope with their cuts? I felt so ready the other day, Had a real foretaste of eternity In my guts. Spoonfeeding me yet another sip from life's cup. I don't want it, won't take any more of it. Let me throw up. Life is medium rare and good, I see, And the world full of soup and bread, But it won't pass into the blood for me, Just goes to my head. It makes me ill, though others it feeds; Do see that I must deny it! For a thousand years from now at least I'm keeping a diet. ↗

— Rainer Maria Rilke

#food #pretty #suicide #diet

There was very little suicide among the men of the North, because every man considered it his duty to get killed, not to kill himself; and to kill himself would have seemed cowardly, as implying fear of being killed by others. ↗

— Lafcadio Hearn

#because #being #considered #cowardly #duty

A large part of the problem, is that young people are being born into the world and growing up without much hope. And so, they become murderers, they become suicide bombers. ↗

— Arthur Hertzberg

#being #bombers #born #growing #growing up

A middle-aged woman who looked like someone's cleaning lady, a shrieking adolescent lunatic and a talkshow host with an orange face... It didn't add up. Suicide wasn't invented for people like this. It was invented for people like Virginia Woolf and Nick Drake. And Me. Suicide was supposed to be cool. ↗

— Nick Hornby

#suicide #age

Among [Applewhite's] other teachings was the classic cult specialty of developing disdain for anyone outside of the Heaven's Gate commune. Applewhite flattered his would-be alien flock that they were an elite elect far superior to the non-initiated humans whom he considered to be deluded zombies.[...]Applewhite effectively fed his paranoid persecution complex to his followers to ensure blind loyalty to the group and himself while fostering alienation from the mundane world. This paradoxical superior/fearful attitude towards “Them” (i.e., anyone who is not one of “Us”) is one of the simplest means of hooking even the most skeptical curiosity seeker into the solipsistic netherworld of a [mentally unbalanced] leader's insecure and threatened worldview. ↗

— Zeena Schreck

#mass-suicides #psychopathology #religious-science-fiction #sects #sociology

All of a sudden I became aware of a little star in one of those patches and I began looking at it intently. That was because the little star gave me an idea: I made up my mind to kill myself that night. I had made up my mind to kill myself already two months before and, poor as I am, I bought myself an excellent revolver and loaded it the same day. But two months had elapsed and it was still lying in the drawer. I was so utterly indifferent to everything that I was anxious to wait for the moment when I would not be so indifferent and then kill myself. Why -- I don't know. ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#dreams

To be or not to be tethered to the sordid, sickly, stinking, sappy apron strings of Hollywood and its endless fondness for fu**ing your sh** up. If Shakespeare were alive today, I bet he’d write a scintillating soliloquy about the Broken Brood of Big Shots. I bet he’d help you out, Micky Affias, ol’ Will the Bard would. Listen, we’ll come visit you. Okay? I’ll dress up as William Shakespeare, Lucent as Emily Dickinson, and beautiful ‘Ray’ as someone dashing and manly like Jules Verne or Ernest Hemingway, and we’ll write on your white-room walls. We’ll write you out of your supposed insanity. I love you, Micky Affias. -James (from "Descendants of the Eminent") ↗

— Tim Cummings

#afterlife #astrology #brothers #children-of-celebrities #class-struggle

Finished in a frenzy that reminded me of our last night in Cambridge. Watched my final sunrise. Enjoyed a last cigarette. Didn’t think the view could be any more perfect until I saw that beat-up trilby. Honestly, Sixsmith, as ridiculous as that thing makes you look, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen anything more beautiful. Watched you for as long as I dared. I don’t believe it was a fluke that I saw you first. I believe there is another world waiting for us, Sixsmith. A better world, and I’ll be waiting for you there. I believe we do not stay dead long. Find me beneath the Corsican stars, where we first kissed. Yours eternally, R.F. ↗

— David Mitchell

#love #love-letter #lovers #suicide-note #beauty

And only after he said it did he realize that among the countless suicides he could remember, this was the first with cyanide that had not been caused by the sufferings of love. Then something changed in the tone of his voice.“And when you do find one, observe with care,” he said to the intern:“they almost always have crystals in their heart. ↗

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

#love #suicide #change