"and he suddenly knew that if she killed herself, he would die. Maybe not immediately, maybe not with the same blinding rush of pain, but it would happen. You couldn't live for very long without a heart."
— Jodi Picoult

"The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets successfully through many a bad night."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won't hurt"
— Hunter S. Thompson

"I went to the worst of bars
hoping to get killed but all I could do was to get drunk again.
"
— Charles Bukowski

"If wild my breast and sore my pride,
I bask in dreams of suicide,
If cool my heart and high my head
I think 'How lucky are the dead.'"
— Dorothy Parker (The Complete Poems of Dorothy Parker)

"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)

"Suicide is man's way of telling God, 'You can't fire me - I quit!'"
— Bill Maher

"Suicide is a form of murder - premeditated murder. It isn't something you do the first time you think of doing it. It takes getting used to. And you need the means, the opportunity, the motive. A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind"
— Susanna Kaysen (Girl, Interrupted)

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

"Instead of finding himself in nerd heaven- where every nerd gets fifty-eight virgins to role-play with- he woke up in Robert Wood Johnson with two broken legs and a separated shoulder, feeling like, well, he'd jumped off the New Brunswick train bridge."
— Junot Díaz

"Why did she do it? Nobody dared to ask. Because - what courage! Who had the courage to burn herself? Twenty aspirin, a little slit alongside the veins of the arm, maybe even a bad half hour standing on a roof: We've all had those. And somewhat more dangerous things, like putting a gun in your mouth. But you put it there, you taste it, it's cold and greasy, your finger is on the trigger, and you find that a whole world lies between this moment and the moment you've been planning, when you'll pull the trigger. That world defeats you. You put the gun back in the drawer. You'll have to find another way.

What was that moment like for her? The moment she lit the match. Had she already tried roofs and guns and aspirins? Or was it just an inspiration?

I had an inspiration once. I woke up one morning and I knew that today I had to swallow fifty aspirin. It was my task: my job for the day. I lined them up on my desk and took them one by one, counting. But it's not the same as what she did. I could have stopped, at ten, or at thirty. And I could have done what I did do, which was go onto the street and faint. Fifty aspirin is a lot of aspirin, but going onto the street and fainting is like putting the gun back in the drawer.

She lit the match."
— Susanna Kaysen (Girl, Interrupted)

"Let them think what they liked, but I didn't mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank -- but that's not the same thing."
— Joseph Conrad (The Secret Sharer and other stories)

""I don't envy him the girl– just the ease of the suicide," he clarified in a teasing tone. "You humans have it so easy! All you have to do is throw down one tiny vile of plant extracts....""
— Stephenie Meyer (New Moon)

"Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide- it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese- the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

"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)

"I don't mind pointing out some of the failings of old age, because we are all headed in that direction, unless of course we take our own lives before we become a burden. I'm not advocating suicide, oh wait, I guess I am."
— Amy Sedaris (I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence)

"Women are constantly trying to commit suicide for love, but generally they take care not to succeed."
— W. Somerset Maugham (The Moon and Sixpence)

"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

"Once on a yellow piece of paper with green lines
he wrote a poem
And he called it “Chops”
because that was the name of his dog
And that’s what it was all about
And his teacher gave him an A
and a gold star
And his mother hung it on the kitchen door
and read it to his aunts
That was the year Father Tracy
took all the kids to the zoo
And he let them sing on the bus
And his little sister was born
with tiny toenails and no hair
And his mother and father kissed a lot
And the girl around the corner sent him a
Valentine signed with a row of X’s
and he had to ask his father what the X’s meant
And his father always tucked him in bed at night
And was always there to do it

Once on a piece of white paper with blue lines
he wrote a poem
And he called it “Autumn”
because that was the name of the season
And that’s what it was all about
And his teacher gave him an A
and asked him to write more clearly
And his mother never hung it on the kitchen door
because of its new paint
And the kids told him
that Father Tracy smoked cigars
And left butts on the pews
And sometimes they would burn holes
That was the year his sister got glasses
with thick lenses and black frames
And the girl around the corner laughed
when he asked her to go see Santa Claus
And the kids told him why
his mother and father kissed a lot
And his father never tucked him in bed at night
And his father got mad
when he cried for him to do it.

Once on a paper torn from his notebook
he wrote a poem
And he called it “Innocence: A Question”
because that was the question about his girl
And that’s what it was all about
And his professor gave him an A
and a strange steady look
And his mother never hung it on the kitchen door
because he never showed her
That was the year that Father Tracy died
And he forgot how the end
of the Apostle’s Creed went
And he caught his sister
making out on the back porch
And his mother and father never kissed
or even talked
And the girl around the corner
wore too much makeup
That made him cough when he kissed her
but he kissed her anyway
because that was the thing to do
And at three A.M. he tucked himself to bed
his father snoring soundly

That’s why on the back of a brown paper bag
he tried another poem
And he called it “Absolutely Nothing”
Because that’s what it was really all about
And he gave himself an A
and a slash on each damn wrist
And he hung it on the bathroom door
because this time he didn’t think
he could reach the kitchen."
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind. "
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

"It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late."
— Émile Michel Cioran

"We knew that Cecilia had killed herself because she was a misfit, because the beyond called to her, and we knew that her sisters, once abandoned, felt her calling from that place, too. "
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

"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)

"And now each night, I count the stars.
And each night I get the same number.
And when the stars won't come to be counted,
I count the holes they leave."
— Leroi Jones

"For weeks Tyrone thought he was going to die any minute, and there were also times when he was afraid he wasnt going to die."
— Hubert Selby Jr. (Requiem for a Dream)

"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 (The Best of Rilke: 72 Form-True Verse Translations with Facing Originals, Commentary, and Compact Biography)

"The thought of suicide is a great source of comfort; with it a calm passage is to be made across many a bad night."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)

"He said you were the only one who was bitter about S.'s suicide and the only one who really forgave him for it. The rest of us, he said, were outwardly unbitter and inwardly unforgiving. "
— J.D. Salinger (Franny and Zooey)

""I am going to put myself to sleep now for a bit longer than usual. Call it Eternity"
"
— Jerzy Kosiński

"Could you just imagine? If every suicide rose--think of Faulkner's Quentin Compson as a vampire. I don't hate the South I don't I don't. She wondered how they'd have worked it out in Cambridge when Quentin threw himself off the Andersen bridge into the Charles amid the odor of the honeysuckle, not the beer, sweat, rum, and tainted magnolias of this city, precariously beneath the level of the water. The Compson blood had thinned out; at least this way, he's restore it after a fashion."
— Susan Shwartz (Carpetbagger)

"We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out windows, or drown themselves, or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us are slowly devoured by some disease, or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) know these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning, we hope, more than anything for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so...There she is with another hour before her."
— Michael Cunningham (The Hours)

"David Goodis didn’t write novels, he wrote suicide notes."
— Ed Gorman

"Life’s greatest gift is the freedom it leaves you to step out of it whenever you choose."
— André Breton (Anthology of Black Humor)

"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 (A Long Way Down)

"There’s no reason to live, but there’s no reason to die, either. The only way we can still show our contempt for life is to accept it. Life is not worth the bother of leaving it. Out of charity, one might spare a few individuals the trouble of living, but what about oneself? Despair, indifference, betrayal, fidelity, solitude, the family, freedom, weight, money, poverty, love, absence of love, syphilis, health, sleep, insomnia, desire, impotence, platitudes, art, honesty, dishonor, mediocrity, intelligence – nothing there to make a fuss about. We know only too well what those things are made of, no point in watching for them."
— Jacques Rigaut

"I've gone out the window.
"
— Professor Levy (Crimes & Misdemeanors)

"…They think of suicide as a quick route to oblivion, an escape. Far from it. It merely alters a person from one form to another. Nothing can destroy the spirit. Suicide only precipitates a darker continuation of the same conditions from which escape was sought. A condition under circumstances so much more painful."
— Richard Matheson (What Dreams May Come)

"...alcohol is only a mediocre, impotent tranquilizer compared to the terminal agony of being human. It is the shame of who we are that gives us the strength to pull ourselves up, but it also holds the temptation to put an end to it all."
— Do Phuoc Tien

"I stood looking down out of the window. The street seemed miles down. Suddenly I felt as if I'd flung myself out of the window. I could see myself lying on the pavement. Then I seemed to be standing by the body on the pavement. I was two people. Blood and brains were scattered everywhere. I knelt down and began licking up the blood and brains"
— Doris Lessing (The Golden Notebook)

"The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it oe gets successfully through many a bad night."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Von allen Abenteuern ist Selbstmord das literarischste, mehr noch als Mord."
— J.M. Coetzee (In the Heart of the Country)

"“David Goodis didn’t write novels, he wrote suicide notes.”"
— Ed Gorman