Jeannette Walls Quotes

I do see that there is an argument against suicide: the grief of the worshipers left behind, the awful famine in their hearts, these are too costly terms for the release.

Suicide carries in its aftermath a level of confusion and devastation that is, for the most part, beyond description.

Suicide leaves everyone feeling guilty.

That, in essence, is the catastrophe of suicide for those who survive: not only the loss of someone, but the loss of the chance to persuade that person to act differently, the loss of the chance to connect.

Suicide is not a blot on anyone’s name; it is a tragedy

I just couldn't go back to Suddenly Susan after David Strickland's suicide. I didn't see how we could make the show light and funny any more.

Looking at suicide—the sheer numbers, the pain leading up to it, and the suffering left behind—is harrowing. For every moment of exuberance in the science, or in the success of governments, there is a matching and terrible reality of the deaths themselves: the young deaths, the violent deaths, the unnecessary deaths

It is cowardice to commit suicide.

The crime of suicide lies rather in its disregard for the feelings of those whom we leave behind.

Grief is forever. It doesn't go away; it becomes part of you, step for step, breath for breath.

Losses do that. One life-loss can infect the whole of a life. Like a rash that wears through our days, our sight becomes peppered with black voids. Now everywhere we look, we only see all that isn’t: holes, lack, deficiency.

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.

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.

Grief is not as heavy as guilt, but it takes more away from you.

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

When someone dies, it is like when your house burns down; it isn't for years that you realize the full extent of your loss.

Death itself is too big to take in, she already sees that; the loss comes at you instead in an infinite number of small installments that can never be paid off.

I simply cannot understand how any parent could kill themselves.

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.

Guns aren't lawful; nooses give; gas smells awful. So you might as well live.

Suicide kills two people.

Suicide is not something I owe you or yours.

I think it will be a miracle if I don't someday end up killing myself.

that since Cecilia’s suicide, the Lisbon’s could hardly wait for the night to forget themselves in sleep

I know I have a very self-destructive tendency since my mother died, I have got to be honest.