Stay Quotes

“None of us can truly know what we mean to other people, and none of us can know what our future self will experience. History and philosophy ask us to remember these mysteries, to look around at friends, family, humanity, at the surprises life brings — the endless possibilities that living offers — and to persevere. There is love and insight to live for, bright moments to cherish, and even the possibility of happiness, and the chance of helping someone else through his or her own troubles. Know that people, through history and today, understand how much courage it takes to stay. Bear witness to the night side of being human and the bravery it entails, and wait for the sun. If we meditate on the record of human wisdom we may find there reason enough to persist and find our way back to happiness. The first step is to consider the arguments and evidence and choose to stay. After that, anything may happen. First, choose to stay.”
― Jennifer Michael Hecht, Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It

“We are humanity, Kant says. Humanity needs us because we are it. Kant believes in duty and considers remaining alive a primary human duty. For him one is not permitted to “renounce his personality,” and while he states living as a duty, it also conveys a kind of freedom: we are not burdened with the obligation of judging whether our personality is worth maintaining, whether our life is worth living. Because living it is a duty, we are performing a good moral act just by persevering.”
― Jennifer Michael Hecht, Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It

“We did not make this world...and our childhood inclinations about how to succeed in it turn out to be wrong: often our courage is needed not to dramatically change reality but to accept it and persist in it.”
― Jennifer Michael Hecht, Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It

“The mistake of Marc Antony’s death haunts all suicides, with its reminder that we do not always know where we really are in our story.”
― Jennifer Michael Hecht, Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It

“I draw from the absurd three consequences. Which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion.”
― Jennifer Michael Hecht, Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It

“It must be recognized that staying alive though suicidal is an act of radiant generosity, a way in which we can save each other.”
― Jennifer Michael Hecht, Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It

“But the ultimate aim of it all—what is it? To sustain ephemeral and tormented individuals through a short span of life, in the most fortunate case with endurable want and comparative freedom from pain, which, however, is at once attended with ennui; then the reproduction of this race and its striving.”
― Jennifer Michael Hecht, Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It

“His philosophy insists that ethics comes first, that “ethics precedes ontology”: the first thing we know is our own being, and the way that we know everything else is through the other person.”
― Jennifer Michael Hecht, Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It

“Either the universe is a cold dead place with a little growth of sentient but atomized beings each all by him- or herself trying to generate meaning, or we are in a universe that is alive with a growth of sentient beings whose members have made a pact with each other to persevere.”
― Jennifer Michael Hecht, Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It

“There are an infinite variety of secret connections and associations in the vast system of things,” and no one can know what he or she might be able to do sometime in the unforeseeable future.”
― Jennifer Michael Hecht, Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It

“Hope, ye miserable. Ye happy, take heed.”
― Jennifer Michael Hecht, Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It

“have the keys to my prison in my own hand, and no remedy presents itself so soon to my heart as mine own sword.”
― Jennifer Michael Hecht, Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It

“Petrarch also writes that suicides are caused by anger, disdain, impatience, and “a kind of furious forgetfulness of what thou art.”
― Jennifer Michael Hecht, Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It

“People across history speak of being haunted by suicides and tempted by them toward the grave.”
― Jennifer Michael Hecht, Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It