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1 " No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life. "
― Al Álvarez , The Savage God: A Study of Suicide
2 " Suicide creates his own society: to shut yourself off from other people in some dingy, rented box and stare, like Melville's Bartleby, day in and day out at the dead wall outside your window is in itself a rejection of the world which is said to be rejecting you. It is a way of saying, like Bartleby, 'I prefer not to' to every offer and every possibility, which is a condition no amount of social engineering will cure. "
3 " When there is no peril in the fight, there is no glory in the triumph. "
― Al Álvarez
4 " Suicide is a confession of failure. And like divorce, it is shrouded in excuses and rationalizations spun endlessly to disguise the simple fact that all one's energy, passion, appetite and ambition have been aborted. "
5 " From that altitude, the world looked calm and vivid and possible. But by the time we landed at Prestwick the clouds were down like the black cap on a hanging judge. "
6 " [Sylvia Plath] was now far along a peculiarly solitary road on which not many would risk following her. So it was important for her to know that her messages were coming back clear and strong. Yet not even her determinedly bright self-reliance could disguise the loneliness that came from her almost palpably, like a heat haze. She asked for neither sympathy nor help but, like bereaved widow at a wake, she simply wanted company in her mourning. "
7 " Suicide may be a declaration of bankruptcy which passes judgement on a life as one long history of failures. But it is a history which also amounts at least to this one decision which, by its very finality, is not wholly a failure. Some kind of minimal freedom — the freedom to die in one's own way and in one's own time — has been salvaged from the wreck of all those unwanted necessities. "
8 " The pity is not that there is a myth of Sylvia Plath but that the myth is not simply that of an enormously gifted poet whose death came carelessly, by mistake, and too soon. "
9 " For the artist himself art is not necessarily therapeutic; he is not automatically relieved of his fantasies by expressing them. Instead, by some perverse logic of creation, the act of formal expressions may simply make the dredged-up material more readily available to him. "
10 " Foolish man, what do you bemoan, and what do you fear? Wherever you look there is an end of evils. You see that yawning precipice? It leads to liberty. You see that flood, that river, that well? Liberty houses within them. You see that stunted, parched, and sorry tree? From each branch liberty hangs. Your neck, your throat, your heart are all so many ways of escape from slavery [...] Do you enquire the road to freedom? You shall find it in every vein of your body. "
11 " I balanced all, brought all to mind, The years to come seemed waste of breath, A waste of breath the years behind In balance with this life, this death. - W. B. YEATS "
12 " Suicide is, after all, the result of a choice. However impulsive the action and confused the motives, at the moment when a man finally decides to take his own life he achieves a certain temporary clarity. Suicide may be a declaration of bankruptcy which passes judgment on a life as one long history of failure. But it is a decision which, by its very finality, is not wholly a failure. There is, I believe, a whole class of suicides who take their own lives not in order to die but to escape confusion, to clear their heads. They deliberately use suicide to create an unencumbered reality for themselves or to break through the patterns of obsession and necessity which they have unwittingly imposed on their lives. "
13 " The earlier poems had all insisted, in their different ways, that she wanted nobody’s help- although I suddenly realized that maybe they had insisted in such a manner as to make you understand that help might be acceptable, if you were willing to make the effort. "
14 " When an artist holds up a mirror to nature he finds out who and what he is; but the knowledge may change him irredeemably so that he becomes that image. "
15 " What,’ asked Coleridge, ‘is the height and ideal of mere association? Delirium "
16 " I offer no solutions. I don’t, in fact, believe that solutions exist, since suicide means different things for different people at different times.Because of this there was never any question of motives: you do it because you do it, just as an artist always knows what he knows. "
17 " For years Sylvia had apparently agreed, pursuing formal virtues and finger-tip detachment, contemptuous of the self-pity, self-advertisement and self-indulgence of the Beatniks. Now, right on cue, came Life Studies to prove that the violence of the self could be written about with control, subtlety and a dispassionate but undefended imagination. "
18 " Hence, too, the terminology of the act. ‘Suicide’, which is a Latinate and relatively abstract word, appeared late. The OED dates the first use as 1651; I found the word a little earlier in Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, written in 1635, published in 1642.f But it was still sufficiently rare not to appear "
19 " not kill.’ The bishops were urged into action by St Augustine; but he, as Rousseau remarked, took his arguments from Plato’s Phaedo, not from the Bible. Augustine’s arguments were sharpened by the suicide-mania which was, above all, the distinguishing mark of the early Christians. "
20 " for individual "
