Primo Levi Quotes

Some people go shopping - I cut myself.

A man who wants to mutilate himself is certainly damned, isn't he?

Delia's arms were inscribed with a grid of self- inflicted wounds, an intricate text of self-loathing

Most self-laceration is more noisy than painful.

I'll burn myself, or I'll cut myself. For a burn or a cut might be shown, might be nursed, might scar or heal, would be a miserable kind of emblem; would anyway be there, on the surface of her body, rather than corroding it from within. Now the thought came to her again, that she might scar herself in some way. It came, like the solution to a problem: I won't be doing it like some hysterical girl. I won't be hoping she'll come catch me at it. It won't be like lying on the sitting-room floor. I'll be doing it for myself, as a secret.

And I ask him why he cuts his arms with a razor. "Just fo feel. Just to feel something.

Self-harm - the world will come at you with knives anyway. You do not need to beat them to it.

I can't stop thinking about cutting myself up. Visual bruises can be covered with make-up, but down to the core, I'm all bruises.

When I was younger, I did self-mutilate. I'd be upset, so I'd do it, & it would calm me down. It's a horrible way to feel better. But there are two parts of your brain - one that really wants to destroy the other. & sometimes the idea of self-destruction is very romantic. I got over that.

It seemed to me the way it must feel to people who cut themselves on purpose. Not pretty, but clean. Not good, but void of regret. I was trying to heal. Trying to get the bad out of my system so I could be good again. To cure me of myself.

For those who need a name, there's a gift basket of medical terms. All I know is cutting made me feel safe. It was proof. Thoughts and words, captured where I could see them and track them. The truth, stinging, on my skin, in a freakish shorthand. Tell me you're going to the doctor, and I'll want to cut worrisome on my arm. Say you've fallen in love and I buzz the outlines of tragic over my breast. I hadn't necessarily wanted to be cured.

Blood transforms the warm bath water and, in it, I see weakly that this was a mistake. The razor's cut is not deep, nevertheless the blood rushes out happily in the warm water as if kin to it, the same tender substance. Rising a new person transformed with an icy sense of error I go to the sink and turn on cold water which is not friendly to blood. The cut is deeper than imagined.

I open a paperclip and scratch it across the inside of my left wrist. Pitiful. If a suicide attempt is a cry for help, then what is this. A whimper, a peep? I draw little window cracks of blood, etching line after line until it stops hurting.

That was when I cut my arms with a razor blade as a means of creative expression. I only did it lightly, just grazing the skin, to see the way the blood would bleed out, to make myself look tougher. Not like some of those kids who keep going deeper and deeper, wondering what they look like down to the bone, because it's a world that's so close and yet so far and so dangerous and so much their own. The only world that is their own.

Tell me that you don’t take that blade and drag it across your skin and pray for the courage to press down.

If a scientist were to cut his ear off, no one would take it as evidence of a heightened sensibility.

I notice faint scars on her wrists and forearms, thin lines too symmetrical to be accidents.

Cutting, and suicide, two very different symptoms of the same problem, are gaining on us. I personally don't know a single person who doesn't know at least two of these victims personally.

I can't even remember how many times I tried to kill myself.

For a while I was suicidal and I tried to kill myself. I think I should have died about four times.

It's true that Blake was emotionally disturbed - always has been - but he doesn't have murder in his heart. If he was going to do any damage to anything or anyone, it would be to himself.

I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.

I never abused anybody but myself.

My body is covered with bruises from pinching myself on a daily basis.

I wanted to get punished, and I took unnecessary punishment when I was fighting.