Suicide Attempt Quotes & Sayings

Leonard and Virginia married in August 1912. Virginia was 30. Soon after her marriage she suVered another breakdown and her mental health declined sporadically over the following year, culminating in a suicide attempt in September 1913. They were advised against having children because of Virginia's recurring depressive illness, a cause of some regret to her, and a point of much heated debate among her later biographers. — Jane Goldman

In World War II, some Japanese soldiers preferred to take their own lives rather become prisoners of war. In Saipan hundreds of civilians jumped to their deaths over cliffs in order to avoid falling into American hands. Even in life-or-death situations cultural ties and duties often outweigh the instinct for survival. This is why people die in the attempt to rescue a dog from drowning, or decide to become suicide bombers. — Harald Welzer

It was you,' I said, my words as new and uncertain as a baby's. I was sixteen and in my bedroom, and I shook my head in an attempt to unscramble my thoughts. 'Not the tongue. The fire.'
I shut my eyes, then opened them to make sure I hadn't made this thing up.
[ ... ]
But Christian hadn't taken his eyes off me, and in his expression I saw a slew of emotions: shame, defiance, fury. Fear, but not for himself. For me. I saw my big brother, who carried me off the ledge at Suicide Rock when I froze up. [ ... ] Who thought I was a fool and had no problem telling me so, but who stuck up for me anyway. — Lauren Myracle

It was my last act of love (first words to her mother in the hospital after her first major suicide attempt) — Sylvia Plath

Both the suicidal and non-suicidal are often angry with others. One way to discharge this anger is to fantasize about violent revenge. The insults of daily life often cause fantasies of revenge to flare up and quickly subside. The people with these fantasies usually do not act on them; they are not motives or goals. They are involuntary responses to perceived insult - ways of coping with rage. The suicidal, whether or not they attempt, suffer tremendous and persistent pain and anger. That this pain should find its way into their fantasies and dreams is no surprise. This ideation is not a motive for action; it is an alternative to action. Fantasizing about suicide is an effort to delay or avoid suicide, not the activity of formulating a motive, goal, or intention. Fantasies doubtlessly succeed in preventing many attempts. — David L. Conroy

I can see the cracks in society, in people, in this world and I'd rather die before slipping into one of them. — Shayne Colaco

It's a little-known secret, and it should probably stay that way: attempting suicide usually jump-starts your brain chemistry. There must be something about taking all those pills that either floods the brain sufficiently or depletes it so completely that balance is restored. Whatever the mechanism, the result is that you emerge on the other side of the attempt with an awareness of what it means to be alive. Simple acts seem miraculous: you can stand transfixed for hours just watching the wind ruffle the tiny hairs along the top of your arm. And always, with every sensation, is the knowledge that you must have survived for a reason. You just can't doubt it anymore. You must have a purpose, or you would have died. You have the rest of your life to discover what that purpose is. And you can't wait to start looking. — Terri Cheney

Never attempt to murder a man who is committing suicide. — Woodrow Wilson

Coach's sad smile suggested that after a suicide attempt, a girl's decisions weighed less, like bodies on the moon. — Lauren Kate

It is like oil. Like molasses, slow at first.Then one morning I woke up and it was flowing free and fast. I thought I would drown in it. I thought it would drown little you and Susan. I got up, got dressed and went out onto the road and tried to jump in front of a bus. I thought it would be a final thing, quick like a bang. Only , it wasn't. — Jerry Pinto

Well, I worked in a sheet metal factory once and scarred my wrist from the cuts. I found a sympathetic psychiatrist who told the draft board I was insane. We used the scars as proof of a suicide attempt. — Tom Verlaine

I wanted to kill the me underneath. That fact haunted my days and nights. When you realize you hate yourself so much, when you realize that you cannot stand who you are, and this deep spite has been the motivation behind your behavior for many years, your brain can't quite deal with it. It will try very hard to avoid that realization; it will try, in a last-ditch effort to keep your remaining parts alive, to remake the rest of you. This is, I believe, different from the suicidal wish of those who are in so much pain that death feels like relief, different from the suicide I would later attempt, trying to escape that pain. This is a wish to murder yourself; the connotation of kill is too mild. This is a belief that you deserve slow torture, violent death. — Marya Hornbacher

Suicide is a permanent answer to a temporary problem." They say, it's not an "answer" in any way. Taking your own life is SE Self Execution, many have said that's a terrible name. I ask should killing yourself sound good? — Stanley Victor Paskavich

It was soon after that I, overwhelmed with the implications of that memory, overdosed - well, somebody did but as it was my mouth and my stomach that was involved I had to take the consequences. Somehow or other (did an alter ring him?) Bruce (from my support group) got to know, drove over and took us to the hospital. — Carolyn Bramhall

Suicide is a selfish attempt to rid the world of wise minds, solely engineered by Satan — Josephine Akhagbeme

That day wasn't the first time I had attempted suicide. Simply disappearing into the distant nothingness where there was no pain and no more feelings - back then I thought it an act of empowerment. Otherwise I had very little power to make any decisions about my life, my body, my actions. Taking my own life seemed my last trump card. — Natascha Kampusch

One in ten adults will attempt suicide, and one in five will suffer from depression. — Russ Harris

When people try to take their own lives, they often don't want to be brought back. When you catch them in time, as is this case, they have a second chance. But they have to want that chance. You see Mrs. Whitman, I have no idea why your daughter did this to herself, but she seems to have no will to live. — Francine Pascal

The driver's on me in an instant. She's crying and trembling. She grabs the front of my jacket and shakes me. "You crazy bitch!" she screams. "I could have killed you!"
"Sorry," I say
"Sorry?" she shouts. "You don't look sorry. You-"
"Sorry you missed," I say.
She lets go of me then. Takes a step back. — Jennifer Donnelly

The first thing you need to know if you are a survivor is that parts of you have probably been trained to create a variety of symptoms and behaviours. Abusers actually train child parts to cut the body, to make other parts cut, to attempt suicide, to create flashbacks by releasing pieces of visual or auditory memories, to create body memories of pain or electroshock, and to create depression, terror, anxiety, and despair by releasing the emotional components of memories to the rest of the personality system. The front person and most of the rest of the system do not know that this is the source of these feelings and behaviours. p126 — Alison Miller

From the perspective of the one committing suicide, his or her act can be one of the most perverse forms of moral manipulation, as it abandons those left behind to their shame, guilt, and grief. Suicide is something like a metaphysical "I gotcha!" It is often an attempt to kill or wound others. — Stanley Hauerwas

Rising from the ashes, I am born again,
powerful, exultant, majestic through all the pain. — Shannon Perry

Yes you have returned
And things are as they were
But this you cannot hide,
A part of you has died. — Joyce Rachelle

I used to think it utterly normal that I suffered from "suicidal ideation" on an almost daily basis. In other words, for as long as I can remember, the thought of ending my life came to me frequently and obsessively. — Stephen Fry

A bind is when you're quadriplegic, suicidal about that and unable to persuade your best friend to murder you. — Brian Spellman

Question of "Where We Begin" turns to be not only a formal question but also a question central to the attempt to make sense of things about which it is very difficult to make any sense - illness, death, despair, suicides, cruelty, the various troubles love can provoke, our inability to really know one another when we our inner selves are walled off by our bodies. — Kyle Minor

you look you see only bitterness or despair. If all of these conditions and situations apply to you, I recommend a refreshing suicide attempt. — Jeff VanderMeer

Availability is a consistent factor in how most people choose to attempt suicide, said Ms. Barber, regardless of age. People trying to die by suicide tend to choose not the most effective method, but the one most at hand. — Anonymous

My mother's mouth drops. 'Emmy...don't say those things Emmy. Remember, we don't talk about those things.'

'Yes Mom. I remember. That's why I'm here, looking like this.'

An orderly knocks on the door and announces that visiting time is over.

My mother and I look at each other awkwardly, and hug.

'I love you,' she says.

'I love you too, Mom.'

'You aren't telling them too much are you?' she asks, afraid.

I sign. 'No Mommy, I'm not.'

She's visibly relieved. She leaves the room.

The orderley comes back and escorts me back into the main room.

I just sit and laugh to myself."

(after Emmy's suicide attempt) ~ The Finer Points of Becoming Machine — Emily Andrews

Edgar Allan Poe was an American poet, short story writer, playwright, editor, critic, essayist and one of the leaders of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of the macabre and mystery, Poe was one of the early American practitioners of the short story and a progenitor of detective fiction and crime fiction. He is also credited with contributing to the emergent science fiction genre.Poe died at the age of 40. The cause of his death is undetermined and has been attributed to alcohol, drugs, cholera, rabies, suicide (although likely to be mistaken with his suicide attempt in the previous year), tuberculosis, heart disease, brain congestion and other agents. Source: Wikipedia — Edgar Allan Poe

She had the look of someone who'd declared herself, and seeing it, my indignation collapsed and her mutinous bath turned into something else entirely. She'd immersed herself in forbidden privileges, yes, but mostly in the belief she was worthy of those privileges. What she'd done was not a revolt, it was a baptism. I saw then what I hadn't seen before, that I was very good at despising slavery in the abstract, in the removed and anonymous masses, but in the concrete, intimate flesh of the girl beside me, I'd lost the ability to be repulsed by it. I'd grown comfortable with the particulars of evil. There's a frightful muteness that dwells at the center of all unspeakable things, and I had found my way into it. As Handful began to shove the vessel back across the piazza, I tried to speak. ". . . . . . Wait. . . . . . I'll. . . . . . help . . ." She turned and looked at me, and we both knew. My tongue would once again attempt its suicide. — Sue Monk Kidd

I think a lot of what is going on with kids who get pushed too far and attempt either murder or suicide is that they are trying to deal with their own non-existence for the people who are supposed to care most for them. — Richard Russo

You can't stop a man from stopping himself. — Brian Spellman

Hey what?' Tyson said. 'Why? What do you need a gurney for?'
'Standard procedure,' the EMT said.
'What do you mean, standard procedure?' Tyson said. 'She's fine. She's hardly bleeding, see?'
Hardly bleeding? Her bandage was soaked through.
'Suicide watch,' the EMT said curtly. 'Someone who tries to kill herself isn't "fine."'
She strapped Starrla to the gurney. Starrla's skirt rode too high, and Wren, ridiculously, wanted to fix it for her. She didn't know how to fix things, though. She didn't know how to fix anything. — Lauren Myracle

Dr. Armonson stitched up her wrist wounds. Within five minutes of the transfusion he declared her out of danger. Chucking her under the chin, he said, "What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets."
And it was then Cecilia gave orally what was to be her only form of suicide note, and a useless one at that, because she was going to live: "Obviously, Doctor," she said, "you've never been a thirteen-year-old girl. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Nothing scares me more than a failed attempt. The last thing I want is to end up in a wheelchair, eating pulverized food and being watched around the clock by some sassy nurse who has a not-so-secret obsession with cheesy reality TV. — Jasmine Warga

A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death. — Virginia Woolf

Die in one universe and yet in another go on without a hitch. If this were true, the person who understood it would have conquered death. Would be invulnerable. Would be the Superman. There's a dizzying thrill in a philosophy that can only be tested by suicide
and then never proven, only tested again by another attempt. And the person embarked on that series of tests, treading that trail of lives as if from boulder to boulder across the river of time
no, out into the burning ocean of eternity
what a mutant! Some new genesis, like a pale, poisonous daisy. — Denis Johnson

Foreign behavior? What the fuck are you talking about? Foreign behavior? Have you read Things Fall Apart? Ifemulu asked, wishing she had not told Ranyinudo about Dike. She was angrier with Ranyinudo than she had ever been, yet she knew that Ranyinudo meant well, and had said what many other Nigerians would say, which was why she had not told anyone else about Dike's suicide attempt since she came back. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I steered by self as evenly as I could, and it was easier than I thought. My bike and I went shooting off the end, and together we well into the sea that's cold and huge and doesn't care whether living boys launch themselves into it or not. — Sarah Moore Fitzgerald

I still can't figure out if it's bravery or cowardice to take your own life. I can't figure out whether it's being selfish, or selfless. It is the ultimate act of letting go of oneself, or a cheap act of self-possession? People say a failed attempt is a cry for help. I guess that's true if the person meant it to be unsuccessful. But then, I guess most failed attempts aren't entirely sincere, because, let's face it, if you want to off yourself, there are plenty of ways to make sure it works. — Neal Shusterman

If you want to commit suicide why tell anyone? They'd ruin everything. — Brian Spellman

Months after my wrists ripping, a talk therapist referred to the act as self-hatred. Until then nobody had said this to me. Did everyone presume that I already knew so? People say it all the time. It's safer to draw this conclusion. Throw in cowardice and you have an insulated public. I was not enraged at all. I was panic stricken. How could I hate myself for wanting to stop such physical sickness and terror? Mine was an act of caretaking, compassion, love. You cannot share this insight with therapists because they think such encourages recurrence. Have you ever stopped diarrhea with a prayer? If you have to go, you go. If you have to die, you die. — Brian Spellman

Then he shook her. "What the fuck were you doing? Since when are you suicidal? Things aren't that bad, dammit." "Hi," she said, and then she grinned impishly him. "Thanks for answering my call." "What?" He stared at her with incomprehension for a moment before understanding dawned. "You mean you faked a suicide attempt just to get me back here? — Eve Langlais

People who try to commit suicide
don't attempt to save them! ... China is such a populous nation, it is not as if we cannot do without a few people. — Mao Zedong

Suicide is a desperate attempt to get out of what seems to be an intolerable situation. It appears to be a way of escape from the pain of living. — June Hunt

I open up a paper clip and scratch it across the inside of my left wrist. Pitiful. If a suicide attempt is a cry for help, then what is this? A whimper, a peep? I draw little windowcracks of blood, etching line after line until it stops hurting. It looks like I arm-wrestled a rosebush. — Laurie Halse Anderson

Death is too much for men to bear, whereas women, who are practiced in bearing the deaths of men before their own and who are alsopracticed in bearing life, take death almost in stride. They go to meet death
that is, they attempt suicide
twice as often as men, though men are more "successful" because they use surer weapons, like guns. — Roger Rosenblatt

I asked him at the clambake in 2001, at the writers' retreat Xanadu, what he'd done during the war, which he called 'civilization's second unsuccessful attempt to commit suicide, — Kurt Vonnegut

Life without knowing your destiny leads to "rat races", depression and frustration, and attempt to commit suicide — Sunday Adelaja

So I sit there kicked my heels, thinking about New Orleans, and watching a morbid blue-bottle fly attempt to commit suicide by butting his head against the windowpane. — Thomas Bailey Aldrich

The writer's life is frightful. I have experienced deep dispair, mental ill and attempt of suicide. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Fear indicates a desire to live — Avery Williams

When you attempt suicide, the counselors try to talk you out of trying it again by asking you about other people, which is good prevention if you care about other people. — Albert Borris

I realise now that the pain Kevin felt - that night, and for nearly eighteen months beforehand, since his suicide attempt - was no less real, no less urgent, than a heart attach, a stroke, a seizure. Than the sensation of running too hard or running too fast, keeling over, grasping for air. Wishing for something to fill your lungs - to rush in and then revive you - except nothing ever does, and maybe nothing ever can.

It is unpleasant, of course, to sympathise with suicide. It is unpleasant to believe in a reality in which death is the only option. And it is problematic, certainly, to compare suicide to running, to cardiac arrest, to terminal cancer. But this is precisely the problem: There is no fair parallel that can be drawn between those who felt the dark pull of suicide and those who never have. — Amy E. Butcher

I half-expect to check out, but I'm really there for it. It's not like at the dance, angry and forced. It's terrible in its gentleness and he's just wasting it on me. — Courtney Summers

And then I went back into my room, locked into a sequence as perfect as a pattern, and I sat down on my great rock throne, invisible to the outside world but palpable beneath me, and from how my face felt I thought maybe I was crying, either because I didn't want to do this or because I did, it was hard to tell and anyway I never would, who would believe me in either case and who would be there to believe me in all cases, it was a puzzle, I had yet to learn the way of the jigsaw, and so I positioned the rifle beneath my chin, it feels cold, like an actual thing in the actual present physical world, OK, there it is, I am here now, and then I lay down on my belly and listened to the rising squall beyond the door. — John Darnielle

Those who commit suicide, pensive, lonely, philosophers, are awake in life, which is a serious crime. In life everybody must be asleep. — Bangambiki Habyarimana

Each way to suicide is its own: intensely private, unknowable, and terrible. Suicide will have seemed to its perpetrator the last and best of bad possibilities, and any attempt by the living to chart this final terrain of life can be only a sketch, maddeningly incomplete — Kay Redfield Jamison

Gay teenagers are four times as likely to attempt suicide as straight ones. I wish they knew that there's nothing wrong with them; that they are just a different shade of normal. — Jodi Picoult

I imagined a psychic pain growing inside him (myself) that demanded some physical outlet. Suicide must have been his attempt to give Pain a body, a representation, to put it outside himself. A need to convert inner torment into some outward tangible wound that all could see. It was almost as though suicide were a last-ditch effort at exorcism, in which the person sacrificed his life in order that the devil inside might die. — Phillip Lopate

What makes us moral beings is that ... there are some acts we believe we ought to die rather than commit ... But now suppose that one has in fact done one of the things one could not have imagined doing, and finds that one is still alive. At that point, one's choices are suicide, a life of bottomless self-disgust, and an attempt to live so as never to do such a thing again. Dewey recommends the third choice. — Richard M. Rorty

If you're selfish enough to kill yourself write your suicide note on the back of your will — Stanley Victor Paskavich

Emotions can override ... the more powerful fundamental motives that drive our lives: hunger, sex, and the will to survive. People will not eat if they think the only food available is disgusting. They may even die, although other people might consider that same food palatable. Emotion triumphs over the hunger drive! A person may never attempt sexual contact because of the interference of fear or disgust, or may never be able to complete a sexual act. Emotion triumphs over the sex drive! And despair can overwhelm even the will to live, motivating a suicide. Emotions triumph over the will to live! — Paul Ekman

I feel as if things are falling apart within me,
like so many glass partitions shattering. I walk from place to place in the grip of a
fury, needing to act, yet can do nothing about it because any attempt seems doomed
in advance. Failure, everywhere failure. Only suicide hovers above me, gleaming and
inaccessible. — Michel Houellebecq

The reason I don't Kill Myself
is because I know I can. — Stanley Victor Paskavich

You are more than the pill.

You are more than the blade.

You are more than the mistake.

You are more than the diagnosis.

You are more than the suicide attempt. — Christopher Lilley

I know I'm going to kill myself. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow. But I know I will. — Anonymous

Like all twenty-one-year-old poets, I thought I would be dead by thirty, and Sylvia Plath had not set a helpful example. For a while there, you were made to feel that, if a poet and female,
you could not really be serious about it unless you'd made a least one suicide attempt. So I felt I was running out of time. — Margaret Atwood

I have experienced deep despair, mental-ill health and attempt of suicide. — Lailah Gifty Akita

I open a paperclip and scratch it across the inside of my left wrist. Pitiful. If a suicide attempt is a cry for help, then what is this. A whimper, a peep? I draw little window cracks of blood, etching line after line until it stops hurting. — Laurie Halse Anderson

One Decision Makes All the Difference — Kimesha Coleman

The truth a fairly important thing to hold on to when you've been pulled out of the sea after wanting to drown in it. I could've let the sea take me. I could easily be dead now, which is funny when you think of it. When I say funny, what I actually mean is weird and kind of disturbing.
When there's the loud sound of a siren screaming in your head it doesn't take too long before a feeling of not caring what happens washed over you and you become recklessly self- destructive. I used to be full of energy and happiness but I could barely remember those kinds of feelings. The cheerful, childish things I used to think had been replaced. A whole load of new realisations had begun to grow inside me like tangled weeds, and they were starting to kill me. That's why I'd make the decision that involved heading ogg to the pier on my pike in the middle of the night and cycling off it. — Sarah Moore Fitzgerald

In other words, a gun is twenty-two times more likely to be used in a criminal assault, an accidental death or injury, a suicide attempt, or a homicide than it is for self-defense.67 — Michael Shermer

People think of suicide in this linear way, as if you get more and more depressed and go on to create a more specific plan, Ms. Barber said. In fact, suicide is often a convergence of factors leading to a sudden, tragic event. In one study of people who survived a suicide attempt, almost half reported that the whole process, from the first suicidal thought to the final act, took 10 minutes or less. — Anonymous

The weird thing is that I hate to fly, and the quote that I give people is that every time I get off a plane, I view it as a failed suicide attempt. — Barry Sonnenfeld

I graciously survived depression, mental-illness and attempt of suicide. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Now, I did know a certain young lady of the 'romantic' generation of not so long ago who, after being mysteriously in love for several years with a certain gentleman whom she could have married at any time without the least difficulty, suddenly broke off their relationship, inventing for herself all manner of insurmountable obstacles, and one stormy night plunged from a high, precipitous cliff into a fairly deep and fast-flowing river, where she perished from her own caprice solely through her attempt to imitate Shakespeare's Ophelia, for, had the precipice, which she had long before singled out and been compulsively drawn to, been less picturesque, and had there been only a prosaically flat bank in its stead, perhaps there would have been no suicide at all. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I have friends who've tried suicide many times and haven't succeeded. I myself made an attempt, so I had a connection with that sort of group of people who have tried suicide at one time in their lives. — Judy Collins

Dr. Leon Stone turned out to be one of the most important people in Horselover Fat's life. To get to Stone, Fat had to nearly kill himself physically, matching his mental death. Is this what they mean about God's mysterious ways? How else could Fat have linked up with Leon Stone? Only some dismal act of the order of a suicide attempt, a truly lethal attempt, would have achieved it; Fat had to die, or nearly die, to be cured. Or nearly cured. — Philip K. Dick

Know this Mr. Davis. I am not crazy. I am not sane. I am not alive. I am not dead. I am not even the human being who you call Dr. Vigo Andersen. I was never born and I will never die. I am an eternal being. I am that I am. This, what you call reality, is just a collective dream. I was about to wake up from it permanently when I was yanked back into this temporal space. I did not try to kill myself. I tried to wake up. — Gudjon Bergmann

It's a singular sort of pain, watching the most beautiful creature self-destruct because you weren't able to find the red wire. — Joyce Rachelle

I was so happy when I found out the wounds you'd inflicted weren't serious, that you had stopped."
"Yes, I stopped. Barry, all of you, see what I did as this suicide attempt. But I didn't want to die. I only wanted my mom to hear me. To come find me. To see that I was sad. To help me, I guess. I just didn't have it in me to tell her what I needed. And fine, I get now that she couldn't read my mind."
He wiped his eyes again.
"But I didn't get it then. I'm so mad at myself. What was wrong with me that I couldn't just tell her? That I didn't have the capacity to ask her for anything. — Anne Eliot

The day Cami nearly succeeded at her suicide attempt was the worst day of Kaci's life. Cami was the only sister that she had, and she couldn't imagine spending the rest of her life without her. — Valenciya Lyons

In a few more days I'd anticipated telling Veronika that our injections had cured her heart condition. But in light of her unscheduled departure form Villette my telling that particular lie will not be required. The majority of people who attempt suicide repeat that attempt until they succeed. I took a risk in lying to her about her condition, i decided to test the only remedy i have come to have any faith in: awareness of life. Until she finds out from some other doctor that she is perfectly healthy. She'll consider each day a miracle. Which in my view it is. — Paulo Coelho

[asked if his suicide attempt was a cry for help]
No. I told no one. You only cry for help if you believe that there's help to cry for. — Wentworth Miller

Responding to a suicide attempt by insisting that it must stop, and devoting the full resources of therapy to preventing it, is a communication with compassion and care at its very core. — Marsha M. Linehan

Women attempt suicide more often because they want to become the priority of those they love rather than always prioritizing them. — Warren Farrell