Andy > Andy's Quotes

“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

“Good humor may be said to be one of the very best articles of dress one can wear in society.”
― William Makepeace Thackeray, Sketches and Travels, Etc.

“If you're in trouble, or hurt or need - go to the poor people. They're the only ones that'll help - the only ones.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“The bravest people are the ones who don’t mind looking like cowards.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

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

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

“If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.”
― David Foster Wallace, Up, Simbal!: 7 Days on the Trail of an Anticandidate

“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

“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 parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.”
― David Foster Wallace

“They tell us that Suicide is the greatest piece of Cowardice... That Suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in this world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Though earth and man were gone,
And suns and universes ceased to be,
And Thou wert left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee.”
― Emily Brontë

“Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more”
― Nikola Tesla

“You think I’ll be the dark sky so you can be the star? I’ll swallow you whole.”
― Warsan Shire

“No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.”
― Atwood H. Townsend

“You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens.”
― Rumi

“Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, 'Where have I gone wrong'.
Then a voice says to me, 'This is going to take more than one night.”
― Charlie Schultz

“Sons of suicides seldom do well. Characteristically, they find life lacking a certain zing. They tend to feel more rootless than most, even in a notoriously rootless nation. They are squeamishly incurious about the past and numbly certain about the future to this grisly extent: they suspect that they, too, will kill themselves.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“Listen to the mustn'ts, child. Listen to the don'ts. Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me... Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.”
― Shel Silverstein

“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You're on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who'll decide where to go...”
― Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Places You’ll Go!

“O Life,
How oft we throw it off and think, — 'Enough,
Enough of life in so much! — here's a cause
For rupture; — herein we must break with Life,
Or be ourselves unworthy; here we are wronged,
Maimed, spoiled for aspiration: farewell Life!'
— And so, as froward babes, we hide our eyes
And think all ended. — Then, Life calls to us
In some transformed, apocryphal, new voice,
Above us, or below us, or around . .
Perhaps we name it Nature's voice, or Love's,
Tricking ourselves, because we are more ashamed
To own our compensations than our griefs:
Still, Life's voice! — still, we make our peace with Life.”
― Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh and Other Poems

“That's the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

“The night is the hardest time to be alive and 4am knows all my secrets.”
― Poppy Z. Brite

“Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well.”
― Mark Twain

“The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night.”
― Nietzsche

“Life is mostly froth and bubble,
Two things stand like stone.
Kindness in another's trouble,
Courage in your own.”
― Adam Lindsay Gordon

“There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds.”
― Laurell K. Hamilton, Mistral's Kiss

“Happiness is something that comes into our lives through doors we don't even remember leaving open.”
― Rose Wilder Lane

“I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“...there will be sleeping enough in the grave....”
― Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin