Ashley’s Reviews > Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide > Status Update

"... Particularly vulnerable to the spectre of their own mental disintegration and the terror of becoming a chronic patient." "... Has Come back is in itself unendurable; its recurrence intolerable, one time too many." Another winter?

"... to reflect profoundly or originally, to see the world other than monochromatically. Giving words to ultimate, dark, and interior acts is difficult enough for those with keen minds in active gear; for those depressed, confused, hopeless, and mentally constricted, eloquence is unlikely to be much in evidence."

"There are sharp limits on our understanding." "Everyone has good cause for suicide, or at least it seems that way to those who search for it. And most will have yet better grounds to stay alive, thus complicating everything."

"I don't think I mind them..."

Hope now,—not health, nor cheerfulness, Since they can come and go again, As often one brief hour witnesses,— Just hope has gone forever. -Edward Thomas

"His illness moved faster than his acceptance of it."

"'Ovid once wrote, 'Welcome this pain, for some day it will be useful to you.''"

"'There is such a thing as life not worthy to be lived ... It is cruel to allow a human being to linger for months in the last stages of agony.'"

"a sense of a mind trying desperately just to hold on" "He is frightened that his 'old beliefs' will come back, and he laments, 'I asked God to help me. I didn't deserve his help. Because I cursed God before I asked him for help.'"

"Something else seemed to live in his shell." "'...continuing to struggle with coming to grips with seeing himself as an individual with an illness.'"