History of a Suicide Quotes

“We do not want to comprehend that people may and do die of emotional pain, or to recognize the terror in ourselves when we cannot seem to help someone in despair -- when our words are empty.”
― Jill Bialosky, History of a Suicide: My Sister's Unfinished Life

“To get through the night, I sometimes imagined the sky filled with a canopy of stars. I imagined that each star contained the soul of a girl or boy who had died too young, and the light the stars gave off was their brightness.”
― Jill Bialosky, History of a Suicide: My Sister's Unfinished Life

“Suicides do not end their lives because they are weak, mentally ill, or depressed - though certainly they may be all those things. They are in blinding, all-consuming psychic pain, and perhaps on that final poisonous day they can find no reason not to.”
― Jill Bialosky, History of a Suicide: My Sister's Unfinished Life

“Our losses become the road maps for our future.”
― Jill Bialosky, History of a Suicide: My Sister's Unfinished Life

“I suppose no one is truly dead when we go on loving them.”
― Jill Bialosky, History of a Suicide: My Sister's Unfinished Life

“As I listen to the stories about those who suffered and ended their lives it seems to me that it isn't as if they wanted to die, but more that they wished to feel better and didn't know how.”
― Jill Bialosky, History of a Suicide: My Sister's Unfinished Life

“I am thinking about you, I say to her. Can you hear me?”
― Jill Bialosky, History of a Suicide: My Sister's Unfinished Life

“If there is a particular time that defined the clear yet inaudible sound of a life beginning to unwind, this was it, the moment before her life began to spin off course, like the point in a novel at which everything that has come before turns and past events reveal their significance. Yet we didn't see it.”
― Jill Bialosky, History of a Suicide: My Sister's Unfinished Life

“She believes that her daughter was in agony and that she chose not to suffer; she needs to believe that through her death Kim now lives on a higher plane. "Why else are flowers so beautiful?" she says to me. "why is the sky such a perfect shade of blue? There has to be more than the here and now.”
― Jill Bialosky, History of a Suicide: My Sister's Unfinished Life

“There are certain things in life for which we can never be prepared.”
― Jill Bialosky, History of a Suicide: My Sister's Unfinished Life

“The great tragedy is that knowledge-even incomplete-comes late.”
― Jill Bialosky, History of a Suicide: My Sister's Unfinished Life