Gabby Carlson > Gabby's Quotes

“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, Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression

“Anne, I don't want to live. . . . Now listen, life is lovely, but I Can't Live It. I can't even explain. I know how silly it sounds . . . but if you knew how it Felt. To be alive, yes, alive, but not be able to live it. Ay that's the rub. I am like a stone that lives . . . locked outside of all that's real. . . . Anne, do you know of such things, can you hear???? I wish, or think I wish, that I were dying of something for then I could be brave, but to be not dying, and yet . . . and yet to [be] behind a wall, watching everyone fit in where I can't, to talk behind a gray foggy wall, to live but to not reach or to reach wrong . . . to do it all wrong . . . believe me, (can you?) . . . what's wrong. I want to belong. I'm like a jew who ends up in the wrong country. I'm not a part. I'm not a member. I'm frozen.”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“People rarely bring flowers to a suicide.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“Nothing in my life has ever made me want to commit suicide more than people's reaction to my trying to commit suicide.”
― Emilie Autumn, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls

“I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't.”
― Susanna Kaysen

“Killing myself was a matter of such indifference to me that I felt like waiting for a moment when it would make some difference.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

“Actually, it was only part of myself I wanted to kill: the part that wanted to kill herself, that dragged me into the suicide debate and made every window, kitchen implement, and subway station a rehearsal for tragedy.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“When you're young and healthy you can plan on Monday to commit suicide, and by Wednesday you're laughing again.”
― Marilyn Monroe, My Story

“There used to be days that I thought I was okay, or at least that I was going to be. We'd be hanging out somewhere and everything would just fit right and I would think 'it will be okay if it can just be like this forever' but of course nothing can ever stay just how it is forever.”
― Nina LaCour, Hold Still

“You need to spend time crawling alone through shadows to truly appreciate what it is to stand in the sun.”
― Shaun Hick

“The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“If they tell you that she died of sleeping pills you must know that she died of a wasting grief, of a slow bleeding at the soul.”
― Clifford Odets

“One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die. This life appears unbearable, another unattainable. One is no longer ashamed of wanting to die; one asks to be moved from the old cell, which one hates, to a new one, which one willl only in time come to hate. In this there is also a residue of belief that during the move the master will chance to come along the corridor, look at the prisoner and say: "This man is not to be locked up again, He is to come with me.”
― Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks

“It was easy enough to kill yourself in a fit of despair. It was easy enough to play the martyr. It was harder to do nothing. To endure your life. To wait.”
― Erica Jong, Fear of Flying

“There are so many things that I want so badly to tell you but I just can't.”
― Nina LaCour, Hold Still

“You might be looking for reasons but there are no reasons.”
― Nina LaCour, Hold Still

“What's the big fucking deal? Lots of amazing people have committed suicide, and they turned out alright.”
― Emilie Autumn, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls

“Suicide only really frightens those who are never tempted by it and never will be, for its darkness only welcomes those who are predestined to it.”
― Georges Bernanos, Mouchette

“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, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness

“No man ever threw away life while it was worth keeping.”
― David Hume, Essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul

“In the meantime, I could withdraw to my room, could hide and sleep as if I were dead”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“I know, too, that death is the only god who comes when you call.”
― Roger Zelazny, Frost & Fire

“It was ironic, really - you want to die because you can't be bothered to go on living - but then you're expected to get all energetic and move furniture and stand on chairs and hoist ropes and do complicated knots and attach things to other things and kick stools from under you and mess around with hot baths and razor blades and extension cords and electrical appliances and weedkiller. Suicide was a complicated, demanding business, often involving visits to hardware shops.

And if you've managed to drag yourself from the bed and go down the road to the garden center or the drug store, by then the worst is over. At that point you might as well just go to work.”
― Marian Keyes, Lucy Sullivan Is Getting Married

“The man who kills a man kills a man.
The man who kills himself kills all men.
As far as he is concerned, he wipes out the world.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“The language of love letters is the same as suicide notes.”
― Courtney Love, Dirty Blonde: The Diaries of Courtney Love

“Crap.
It's all crap.
Living is crap.
Life has no meaning.
None. Nowhere to be found.
Crap.
Why doesn't anybody realize this?”
― K-Ske Hasegawa, Ballad of a Shinigami, Vol. 1

“Melancholy suicide. —This is connected with a general state of extreme depression and exaggerated sadness, causing the patient no longer to realize sanely the bonds which connect him with people and things about him. Pleasures no longer attract;”
― Émile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology

“He was fucking sad. That's it. That's the point. He knows life is never going to get any different for him. That there's no fixing him. It's always going to be the same monotonous depressing bullshit. Boring, sad, boring, sad. He just wants it to be over.”
― Jasmine Warga, My Heart and Other Black Holes

“Chronic anxiety is a state more undesirable than any other, and we will try almost any maneuver to eliminate it. Modern man is living in anxious anticipation of destruction. Such anxiety can be easily eliminated by self-destruction. As a German saying puts it: 'Better an end with terror than a terror without end.”
― Robert E. Neale, The Art of Dying

“This is what I want so don't be sad.”
― Nina LaCour, Hold Still