Phil Elverum Quotes

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.

It was a really interesting thing to explore, the strength it takes for someone to stay when they truly do not want to be on this Earth anymore.

You might find it difficult to see anything but your own sadness, the way smoke can cover a landscape so that all anyone can see is black. You may find that if someone pours water all over you, you are damp and distracted, but not cured of your sadness, the way a fire department can douse a fire but never recover what has been burnt down.

Cancer is awful. It took 10 years until I didn't think about it every day. Nobody should go through this. Nobody.

That's the thing about suicide. Try as you might to remember how a person lived his life, you always end up thinking about how he ended it.

Suicide doesn't solve your problems. It only makes them infinitely, un-countably worse.

It's... a hard thing for a director, to think you came up with a shot, something from your mind, and someone died while doing it. It's the worst thing you'll ever have to live with. It was very hard for me to get back on the horse again.

I saw Suicide in '74 and it was pretty horrifying.

I know from my own personal experience. I was bullied in middle school and high school and went through my fair share of hard times thereafter. Also, one of my really good friends committed suicide when I was in high school.

If you really want to kill yourself, you get a gun and blow your head off.

I don't think I've ever put it in words before. But daddy took a gun and ended his life and took momma's with him.

'Eyes Wide Open' took shape from two real life events straight from my own past. One was the sad suicide of my young nephew, a troubled kid, who was found at the bottom of a landmark cliff in central California. The second was a chance encounter forty years ago with none other than, ahem, Charles Manson!

When I lost my dad, there was no one there to be the disciplinarian, and we kind of ran amok.

I think losing your mother at such a young age does end up shaping your life massively. Of course it does, and now I find myself trying to be there and give advice to other people who are in similar positions.

That was the toughest thing I ever had to do: tell my son that his mum was gone. I was a bachelor living on the beach, but I had to pull it together very quick for my boy.

When suicide hit my family, we learned first-hand that no one is immune from what is now the 10th leading cause of death in the US.

For a long time, I didn't want to live.

'Sons of the Prophet' is a dark comedy about human suffering. The play explores the particularly messy portions of life - the times where you find yourself coping with multiple life issues, and before any of them can be resolved, two more show up on your plate. We've all been there, I'd wager.

Sometimes I worry that I've lost the plot My twitching muscles tease my flippant thoughts I never really dreamed of heaven much Until we put him in the ground. There is nothing as lucky, as easy, or free

It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.

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

Instead of committing suicide, people go to work.

I think you have waves of awareness and one of the things that I found with grief was actually - I was well prepared for it by the cyclicality of my manic depressive illness because I was used to things coming and going and so forth.

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.

I would feel real trapped in this life if I didn't know I could commit suicide at any time.