Emile Durkheim Quotes

Suicide is the role you write for yourself. You inhabit it and you enact it. All carefully staged -- where they will find you and how they will find you. But one performance only.

Part of me wonders if this is a suicide mission disguised as a game.

Suicide is the worst form of murder, because it leaves no opportunity for repentance.

Suicide is the most private and mysterious of acts, inexplicable because the chief actor is never there to explain it.

They'll just cut our wrists like Cheap coupons and say that death Was on sale today.

Like sex, poverty and power, suicide may always be with us. But like them again, the actual form is takes is essentially time-specific and culture-bound, not only in the past but in the present too. The people who took their lives, the paths which led them to that end, and the experience of dying in this way were deeply influenced by specific historical circumstances. Only by making a greater effort at historical understanding can this most secret house of death be made to yield up more of its confidences.

A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind.

Suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build.

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.

If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again.

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

By what aberration has suicide, the only truly normal action, become the attribute of the flawed?

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

A suicide is both a rebuke to the living and a puzzle that defies them to solve it. Like a poem, suicide is finished and refuses to answer questions as to its final cause.

We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm.

Suicide thwarts the plan of the entity which sends out the personality. Fortunately, the entity is far beyond the reach of man's destructive tendencies.

Everyone has good cause for suicide, or at least it seems that way to those who search for it. (74)

Chelsea Manning attempted to commit suicide twice last year.

Yes I try to kill myself in small amounts, an innocuous occupation. Actually I'm hung up on it.

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

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.

...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.

Here's the difficulty about suicide: it is an act of ambition that can be committed only when one has passed beyond ambition.

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

They tried to get me-I got them first! (suicide note)