What a silly thing to do, he thought. What a goddam silly thing to do. — Suicide

"Dont commit suicide, because you might change your mind two weeks later."

"The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesnt do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that lifes 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 fires flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. Its not desiring the fall; its terror of the flames. Yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don‘t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. Youd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling."

"There be many excellent straines in that Poet (Lucan), wherewith his Stoicall Genius hath liberally supplyed him; and truely there are singular pieces of the Philosophy of Zeno, and doctrine of the Stoickes, which I perceive, delivered in a Pulpit, passe for currant Divinity, yet herein are they extream that can allow a man to be his owne Assassine, and so highly extoll the end of Cato, this is indeed not to feare death, but yet to be afraid of life. It is a brave act of valour to contemne death, but where life is more terrible then death, it is then the truest valour to dare to live, and herein Religion hath taught us a noble example: For all the valiant acts of Curtius, Scevola, or Codrus, doe not parallell or match that one of Job, and sure there is no torture to the racke of a disease, nor any Poneyard in death itselfe like those in the way or prologue unto it.Emori nolo, sed me esse mortuum nihil curo, I would not dye, but care not to be dead. Were I of Cæsars Religion I should be of his desires, and wish rather to be tortured at one blow, then to be sawed in peeces by the grating torture of a disease."

"Men have committed suicide out of sheer cowardice, afraid to face the results of their own actions; in such cases there is unquestionably moral wrong. Such a man throws himself, in the fullest consciousness, into the lowest and most unpleasant part of the astral world, where a good deal of suffering may be his lot. He often realizes immediately that he has made a mistake, that he has done wrong; but he has to bear the consequences of his rash act. p. 169"

"In time, when we became adults, we might look back on this pain and loneliness as a funny thing, perfectly ordinary, but—but how were we expected to get by, to get through this interminable period of time until that point when we were adults? There was no one to teach us how. Was there nothing to do but leave us alone, like we had the measles? But people died from the measles, or went blind. You couldnt just leave them alone. Some of us, in our daily depressions and rages, were apt to stray, to become corrupted, irreparably so, and then our lives would be forever in disorder. There were even some who would resolve to kill themselves. And when that happened, everyone would say, Oh, if only she had lived a little longer she would have known, if she were a little more grown up she would have figured it out. How saddened they would all be. But if those people were to think about it from our perspective, and see how we had tried to endure despite how terribly painful it all was, and how we had even tried to listen carefully, as hard as we could, to what the world might have to say, they would see that, in the end, the same bland lessons were always being repeated over and over, you know, well, merely to appease us. And they would see how we always experienced the same embarrassment of being ignored. Its not as though we only care about the present. If you were to point to a faraway mountain and say, If you can make it there, its a pretty good view, Id see that theres not an ounce of untruth to what you tell us. But when you say, Well, bear with it just a little longer, if you can make it to the top of that mountain, youll have done it, you are ignoring the fact that we are suffering from a terrible stomachache—right now. Surely one of you is mistaken to let us go on this way. Youre the one who is to blame."

"Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well."