Tom Waits Quotes

I was so busy fighting and so busy trying to keep everything above water that I didn't realize I was spiraling downward with nowhere to go.

I feel like dying when I'm helpless

I have spent my life falling. Not the kind that Tiny's talking about. He's talking about love. I'm talking about life. In my kind of falling, there's no landing. There's only hitting the ground. Hard. Dead, or wanting to be dead. So the whole time you're falling, it's the worst feeling in the world. Because you feel you have no control over it. Because you know how it ends.

I feel as if things are falling apart within me, like so many glass partitions shattering. I walk from place to place in the grip of a fury, needing to act, yet can do nothing about it because any attempt seems doomed in advance. Failure, everywhere failure. Only suicide hovers above me, gleaming and inaccessible.

You know, sometimes I feel well and vital in the world, and sometimes I just feel so distressed I want to pull my hair out by the roots.

For death is not the worst, but when one wants to die and is not able even to have that.

When you want to die, you at least have a goal. You're aiming for something. It's not a good goal, but at least you want something. And you've got anger and fear, but at least you're feeling something.

The great thing about suicide is that it's not one of those things you have to do now or you lose your chance. I mean, you can always do it later.

I felt like I was the only person on the planet with this 'thing called depression', and I remember being frightened. I was knocked out and dopey, and I cried all of the time.

Sometimes I wonder if suicides aren't in fact sad guardians of the meaning of life.

The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.

I'm worth more dead than alive. Don't cry for me after I'm gone; cry for me now.

Oh my God. My God. It’s all over.

People's fear doth ofttimes degenerate into desperation

I think one of the scariest things about depression is that it exists along with the happiness and the joy, and it kind of plays with it and sucks the color from it.

Depression, for me, has been a couple of different things - but the first time I felt it, I felt helpless, hopeless, and things I had never felt before. I lost myself and my will to live.

It got to a point where I didn't care if I lived or I died.

Did I pray for death? I did one time. I wanted to die so badly. And I didn't want to die. I wanted to rest, you know. And I knew the only rest I would find is in death.

I'm broken from the inside. The depression that has slowly eaten away at me has finally consumed me, and I couldn't beat it.

It got to a point where I didn't care... about living at all.

I am alive again, now that I can no longer stand to live.

A man who wants to die feels angry and full of life and desperate and bored and exhausted, all at the same time; he wants to fight everyone, and he wants to curl up in a ball and hide in a cupboard somewhere. He wants to say sorry to everyone, and he wants everyone to know just how badly they've all let him down.

You’re going to leave me, aren’t you? … You’ve had enough of me, haven’t you? You’re probably so tired of all this crying and all these moods, and I’ve got to tell you, so am I. So am I. Sometimes it seems like my mind has a mind of its own, like I just get hysterical, like it’s something I can’t control at all. And I don’t know what to do, and I feel so sorry for you because you don’t know what to do either. And I’m sure you’re going to leave me now.

I don't kill myself. I can't live like that.

Don't untie me," she said, "no matter what happens or how much I plead. I'll want to go straight over the edge and drown myself." "Are you trying to tempt me?" "Ha-ha.