Simon Baron-Cohen Quotes

In Jenny Offill's remarkable first novel, 'Last Things,' 7-year-old Grace Davitt watches her mother, Anna, descend into madness and tries to make sense of the claustrophobic world that Anna has created for her.

I got into therapy in the fifth grade because I said in a sarcastic way that I was going to kill myself, and they didn't get it then. Nothing's changed.

I was a really, really depressed kid.

I've noticed a pattern in stars that start acting out in public. Every one of them felt like they grew up without love.

If I were sufficiently romantic I suppose I'd have killed myself long ago just to make people talk about me. I haven't even got the conviction to make a successful drunkard.

My mother had a very difficult childhood, having seen her own mother kill herself. So she didn't always know how to be the nurturing mother that we all expect we should have.

A parent who is high is unavailable to attend to the needs of a child.

I sometimes wonder if I'm a psychopath.

I am a self-destructive idiot.

Addiction's some kind of disease? No, it's not. It's a mask for pain that usually comes from childhood and fatherlessness.

Not everybody loves their children. If that was a fact, all the children would be happy and they would make happy adults. Instead, we have lots of miserable children that later became miserable adults. This is a fact. We cannot change that.

So you grow up with those messages, "You're a failure, you embarrass me, that's why I dress you in dark colors etc." or even when parents commit suicide, the child may think they were a failure as a child causing that. The majority of those people who weren't loved turn to drugs and alcohol and suicide.

When you're hurt very badly in your childhood, the area that it has the greatest effect on is relationships. Once you feel like you can't trust people, once you feel like that they don't care about you, that they're really not going to take care of you, it gets very difficult in relationships.

I can tell you that I am not self-destructive. I'm not a person who wants to die. I'm a person who has life, who wants to live. And I always have. And I wouldn't mistake it for anything else other than that.

Suicide is a form of murder - premeditated murder. It isn't something you do the first time you think of doing it. It takes getting used to. And you need the means, the opportunity, the motive. A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind.

Suicide. A sideways word, a word that people whisper and mutter and cough: a word that must be squeezed out behind cupped palms or murmured behind closed doors. It was only in dreams that I heard the word shouted, screamed.

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

I want to kill myself, to escape from responsiblity, to crawl abjectly back into the womb.

...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.

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.

You have endless ways you can commit suicide without dying dying.

Perhaps it had nothing to do with sin and everything to do with sociopathy, that most incurable of human disorders because all so afflicted consider themselves blessed rather than cursed.

I am too busy thinking about killing myself.

A split personality can never become non-greedy. It can try, but it can never become. A split personality can never go beyond anger. It can try, but it can never go beyond. A split personality can never go beyond sex. It can fight. So many monks in the monasteries are doing it. They don't go beyond sex; at the most their sexuality becomes perverted, their love becomes poisoned.

All of a sudden I became aware of a little star in one of those patches and I began looking at it intently. That was because the little star gave me an idea: I made up my mind to kill myself that night. I had made up my mind to kill myself already two months before and, poor as I am, I bought myself an excellent revolver and loaded it the same day. But two months had elapsed and it was still lying in the drawer. I was so utterly indifferent to everything that I was anxious to wait for the moment when I would not be so indifferent and then kill myself. Why -- I don't know.