Kay Redfield Jamison Quotes

...we ask: Why suicide? We search for reasons, causes, and so on.... We follow the course of the life he has now so suddenly terminated as far back as we can. For days we are preoccupied with the question: Why suicide? We recollect details. And yet we must say that everything in the suicide's life- for now we know that all his life he was a suicide, led a suicide's existence- is part of the cause, the reason, for his suicide.

Suicide: Don't knock it if you ain't tried it.

No matter what anyone says, suicide takes guts. It's for heroes and martyrs, truly vainglorious men. Archie was none of these. He was a man whose significance in the Greater Scheme of Things could be figured along familiar ratios: Pebble : Beach Raindrop : Ocean Needle : Haystack

Suicide is the only way out.

I can almost understand why people leap from bridges.

All my life I have had the utmost admiration for suicides. I have always considered them superior to me in every way.

Suicide - when I think of it, to me it means someone had a lot of problems and they couldn't fight through them anymore. That's not cowardly. It's sad and nothing but.

If somebody wants to shoot up and die in front of you, more power to them. The herd has a way of thinning itself out.

There is only one prospect worse than being chained to an intolerable existence: The nightmare of a botched attempt to end it.

Nowadays, suicide is just a way of disappearing. It is carried out timidly, quietly, and falls flat. It is no longer an action, only a submission.

On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide- it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese- the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.

It is always consoling to think of suicide: in that way one gets through many a bad night.

I don't persuade to suicide.

Suicide is not an answer, it's destruction.

Nine men in ten are would be suicides.

The man, who in a fit of melancholy, kills himself today, would have wished to live had he waited a week.

There's nothing beautiful about somebody killing themselves.

Act on your impulse, swallow the bottle, cut a little deeper, put the gun to your chest.

[I] have fantasies of killing myself and thus being the powerful one not the powerless one.

I am not even alive enough to know how to kill myself

There are a great many ways to commit suicide you know.

Lilly was not crazy. She left a serious suicide note. 'Sorry,' said the note. 'Just not big enough.

It (suicide) became a possibility like Maybe when I grow up, I will be dead. Life was a cake that looked good on the bakery shelf but turned to sawdust and salt when I ate it.

I have at times tried to imagine the despair which leads to suicide, attempted to conjure up the slew and slop of darkness in which only death appears as a pinprick of light: in other words, the exact opposite of the normal condition of life.

Killing myself was a matter of such indifference to me that I felt like waiting for a moment when it would make some difference.