Suicide QUOTES

1 " A dictionary resembles the world more than a novel does, because the world is not a coherent sequence of actions but a constellation of things perceived. It is looked at, unrelated things congregate, and geographic proximity gives them meaning. If events follow each other, they are believed to be a story. But in a dictionary, time doesn't exist: ABC is neither more nor less chronological than BCA. To portray your life in order would be absurd: I remember you at random. My brain resurrects you through stochastic details, like picking marbles out of a bag. "

― Édouard Levé , Suicide

2 " When you traveled with company, the country would shrink away; your companion would become the subject of your voyage as much as the country itself. As for group travel, the country would end up being the silent host whose presence one forgets like one does an overly timid guest, the principal subject becoming the backdrop. "

― Édouard Levé , Suicide

3 " In the midst of this utopia, which only your fellow lone voyagers would perceive, you used to transgress society’s rules unknowingly, and no one would hold you accountable for it. You would mistakenly enter private residences, go to concerts to which you had not been invited, eat at community banquets where you could only guess the community’s identity when they started giving speeches. Had you behaved like this in your own country, you would have been taken for a liar or a fool. But the improbable ways of a foreigner are accepted. Far from your home, you used to taste the pleasure of being mad without being alienated, of being an imbecile without renouncing your intelligence, of being an impostor without culpability. "

― Édouard Levé , Suicide

4 " You did not fear death. You stepped in its path, but without really desiring it: how can one desire something one doesn’t know? You didn’t deny life but affirmed your taste for the unknown, betting that if something existed on the other side, it would be better than here. "

― Édouard Levé , Suicide

5 " Your life was a hypothesis. Those who die old are made of the past. Thinking of them, one thinks of what they have done. Thinking of you, one thinks of what you could have become. You were, and you will remain, made up of possibilities. "

― Édouard Levé , Suicide

6 " You were not surprised to find yourself ill adapted to the world, but it did surprise you that the world had produced a being who now lived in it as a foreigner. Do plants commit suicide? Do animals die of helplessness? They either function or disappear. You were perhaps a weak link, an accidental evolutionary dead end, a temporary anomaly not destined to burgeon again. "

― Édouard Levé , Suicide

7 " The last time I saw you, you were wearing a white cotton shirt. You were standing upright with your wife on the lawn, in the sunlight, in front of the chateau, at my brother’s wedding. You shared in the enthusiasm of the ceremony. For my part, I felt distanced from it. I didn’t recognize my family in this mundane get-together. You didn’t seem put off by the bourgeois ceremony, or by my brother’s choice to have his love approved by third parties, even when these were distant third parties. You didn’t have the sad and absent look you normally took on at public gatherings. You smiled, watching the people, a little tipsy from the wine and the sun, chatting on the large lawn between the white stone façade and the two-hundred-year-old cedar tree. I often wondered, after your death, if that smile, the last one I saw from you, was mocking, or if instead it was the kindly smile of someone who knew that soon he would no longer partake in earthly pleasures. You didn’t regret leaving these behind, but neither were you averse to enjoying them a little longer. "

― Édouard Levé , Suicide

8 " Since you seldom spoke, you were rarely wrong. You seldom spoke because you seldom went out. If you did go out, you listened and watched. Now, since you no longer speak, you will always be right. In truth, you do still speak: through those, like me, who bring you back to life, and interrogate you. We hear your responses and admire their wisdom. If the facts turned out to contradict your counsel, we blame ourselves for having misinterpreted you. Yours are the truths, ours are the errors. "

― Édouard Levé , Suicide

9 " You used to believe that with age you would become less unhappy, because you then would have reasons to be sad. When you were still young, your suffering was inconsolable because you believed it to be unfounded.

Your suicide was scandalously beautiful…

You died because you searched for happiness at the risk of finding the void. We shall have to wait for death before we can know what it is that you found. Or before leaving off knowing anything at all, if it is to be silence and emptiness that awaits us. "

― Édouard Levé , Suicide

10 " Tvůj otec na ostatní uplatňoval násilí. Tvá matka soucítila s utrpením druhých. Jednoho dne jsi násilí, které jsi zdědil, obrátil proti sobě samému. ZPŮSOBIL jsi je jako tvůj otec a PŘIJAL jako tvá matka. "

― Édouard Levé , Suicide

11 " Te controlabas menos, los medicamentos se habían adueñado de tu estado de ánimo.
¿Valía la pena perder tu libre albedrío por un poco de felicidad ficticia? "

― Édouard Levé , Suicide

12 " Pensabas que al ir envejeciendo serías menos desdichado, porque para entonces tendrías razones para estar triste. Siendo joven todavía, tu angustia era inconsolable porque la juzgabas infundada.
Tu suicidio fue una belleza escandalosa. "

― Édouard Levé , Suicide

13 " Tu suicidio fue el pronunciamiento más importante de tu vida, pero no recogerás sus frutos.
¿Estás muerto si te hablo? "

― Édouard Levé , Suicide

14 " El equilibrio me tienta
la caída me revela
La recuperación me cuesta

El tiempo me falta
el espacio me basta
el vacío me atrae

El error me enseña
el hábito me mejora
La perfección me obsesiona

Construir me obsesiona
conservar me sosiega
Destruir me alivia

La felicidad me precede
la tristeza me sigue
La muerte me espera "

― Édouard Levé , Suicide

15 " You were said to have died of suffering. But there was not
as much sadness in you as there is now in those who
remember you. You died because you searched for
happiness at the risk of finding the void. "

― Édouard Levé , Suicide

16 " You are like the actor who, at the end of the play, with a final word, reveals that he is a different character than the one he appeared to be playing. "

― Édouard Levé , Suicide

17 " When you were awake, stretched out in your bed in the dark, shutters drawn, your thoughts would flow freely. They would grow obscure when you got up and opened the curtains. The violence of daylight would efface the nocturnal clarity. In the daytime, people were barriers, dividing you up, preventing you from hearing what you listened to at night: the voice of your brain. "

― Édouard Levé , Suicide

18 " And so you worried about not remembering what happened in between the things you wrote down. You had lived those moments too. Where had they gone? "

― Édouard Levé , Suicide

19 " Your taste for literature did not come from your father, who read little, but from your mother, who taught it. You wondered how, being so different, they could have formed a union; but you noted that in you there was a mixture of the violence of the one and the gentleness of the other. Your father exerted his violence on others. Your mother was sympathetic to the suffering of others. One day you directed the violence you had inherited toward yourself. You dished it out like your father and you took it like your mother. "

― Édouard Levé , Suicide

20 " You couldn’t have been said to dance, exactly. Despite the music sounding around you, bodies being carried away by the whirling bass, it didn’t get inside you. You used to trace out the steps, but you were mimicking dancing, rather than doing it. You would dance alone. When a look crossed yours, you’d smile like someone caught off guard in an absurd situation. "

― Édouard Levé , Suicide