#suicide

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

#suicide #death

My mother's suicide attempts were a way to release anxiety and get attention. Some of the attempts were drug reactions she didn't even remember later on. ↗

— Lorna Luft

#attempts #attention #even #get #later

It is always consoling to think of suicide: in that way one gets through many a bad night. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#bad #consoling #gets #many #night

I lost two of the greatest men I've ever known to assassination - and a son to suicide. ↗

— Pierre Salinger

#ever #greatest #greatest men #i #known

Political courage is not political suicide. ↗

— Arnold Schwarzenegger

#political #suicide

I'm always looking for something that's real and that's got meat on it. I think it's artistic suicide if you're too vain, or if you're afraid to play ugly. I would never fall for that. ↗

— Bill Skarsgard

#always #artistic #fall #got #i

We might be on the brink of an apocalypse if, instead of poor people with suicide bombs killing middle class guys, middle-class people with suicide bombs started killing rich guys. ↗

— Bruce Sterling

#bombs #brink #class #guys #instead

Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder. ↗

— Arnold J. Toynbee

#die #murder #suicide

Is it hard for the reader to believe that suicides are sometimes committed to forestall the committing of murder? There is no doubt of it. Nor is there any doubt that murder is sometimes committed to avert suicide. ↗

— Karl A. Menninger

#avert #believe #committed #committing #doubt

J_Doe032692 wrote: I am not a thin person. However this does not give people the right to taunt me, calling me ugly and worthless, telling me to kill myself because no one will ever want me, or to make up songs about why I am so fat and how much food I eat. NO ONE, I repeat, NO ONE HAS THE RIGHT TO HURT ANOTHER HUMAN BEING THIS BADLY. My throat constricts. The neck brace feels as if it's shrinking and cutting off my esophagus. I reach up and cover the words with my hand and the web site dissolves. I want to go. Now. ↗

— Julie Anne Peters

#bullying #fat #shame #shaming #suicide