Toni Morrison Quotes

It's not easy to live every moment wholly aware of death. It's like trying to stare the sun in the face: you can stand only so much of it. Because we cannot live frozen in fear, we generate methods to soften death's terror. We project ourselves into the future through our children; we grow rich, famous, ever larger; we develop compulsive protective rituals; or we embrace an impregnable belief in an ultimate rescuer.

The ready availability of suicide, like sex and alcohol, is one of life's basic consolations.

I would like to grow less afraid of dying. I am infinitely less afraid today than I was 15 or 25 years ago. I was most afraid of dying when I was 33, because I come from a Catholic family.

Suicide sometimes proceeds from cowardice, but not always; for cowardice sometimes prevents it; since as many live because they are afraid to die, as die because they are afraid to live.

Killing yourself is a major commitment, it takes a kind of courage. Most people just lead lives of cowardly desperation. It's kinda half suicide where you just dull yourself with substances.

I've worked very hard to become comfortable with how death works and why it happens. I now know that death isn't out to get me.

I have an obsession with mortality. I saw a friend die when I was 18, and I can't get over it.

'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!

There is a way that a younger person can accept the inevitable problem that they're going to die, whereas somebody a little bit older might be overcome.

There was a moment in my life when I really wanted to kill myself. And there was one other moment when I was close to that. But even in my most jaded times, I had some hope.

I read The Bell Jar, and then I read her memoir and her diaries, and a third book, an outside opinion. Just the way she made the pillows so neat on the oven door. It just seems to be the opposite of, if you're going to take your life, in a horrible rage it happens.

It’s bullshit. When people are dying, bureaucracy should be thrown out. I saw a guy kill himself at the Superdome. Two policemen have committed suicide.

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.

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.

Actually, it was only part of myself I wanted to kill: the part that wanted to kill herself, that dragged me into the suicide debate and made every window, kitchen implement, and subway station a rehearsal for tragedy.

There is no madder nation than Japan. ... And that nation has the highest rate of suicide, has the highest rate of thick-lens glasses and did the most suicidal trick a few years ago. It's the doggonedest country.

We also have this reflex of using specialists for everything, instead of having the person who is there every day with them, the teacher, talk about death and suicide. In the film, it's portrayed a little bit like a caricature, but it's the psychologist who comes in and Monsieur Lazhar does not think it's a good idea. He thinks he should be the one who should talk about that with the children.

I can't get my wrists to bleed, just don't know why suicide appeals to me.

in the nineteenth year and the eleventh month speak your tattered Kaddish for all suicides: Praise to life though it crumbled in like a tunnel on ones we knew and loved Praise to life though its windows blew shut on the breathing-room of ones we knew and loved Praise to life though ones we knew and loved loved it badly, too well, and not enough Praise to life though it tightened like a knot on the hearts of ones we thought we knew loved us Praise to life giving room and reason to ones we knew and loved who felt unpraisable. Praise to them, how they loved it, when they could.

I couldn't commit suicide if my life depended on it.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there.

To my mind, there are two things that, in life, you can do about death. Either you can choose to ignore it, in which case you may have some success in making the idea of it go away for a limited period of time, or you can confront the prospect of your own death and try to analyze it and, in so doing, try to minimize some of the inevitable suffering that it causes. Neither way can you actually overcome it.

You are certainly wrong to compare suicide ... with great accomplishments, since it cannot be considered as anything but a weakness. After all, it is easier to die than to endure a harrowing life with fortitude.

Moments is about a girl dying and her boyfriend committing suicide because he can't live without her

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