Suicide

“ The reasonableness of suicide in the first case is obvious, if Death is not annihilation. I should catch you up. In the second, all the Hereafters in the Universe would be no worse for me than Life in the dark, without you, here and now. ”

“ Unfortunately, I never settled, as you know, a farthing on my wife; and as for my life-insurance, they illogically and unreasonably exclude suicide from their list of casualties. Your ordinary suicide does not compass his own death any more doggedly than the man who persists in living in an undrained house, or in drinking brandy until his brain gives way, or in lighting his pipe in a coal-mine. ”

“ THE SUICIDE'S GRAVE.
The suicide's grave—where is it? It is at the meeting or crossing of three public roads; the body has been thrust down, under the darkness of night, into a coffinless grave. The breast, formerly torn and lacerated by passions, has lately been mangled into horrid deformity by the pointed stake; and the traveller, as he walks, rides, or drives along, regards the spot with an eye of suspicion, and blesses his stars that he is a living man. The suicide's grave—where is it? On the bare and cold top of that mountain which divides Lanark from Dumfriesshire. ”

“ In a moment, I went through all the agonies of suicide, which left me alive, alas, to burn with the shame of the treasonable thought, and terrified by the revolt of my soul refusing to leave the world in which a young girl lived! ”

“ For the first time in her life she thought of suicide—not suicide the vague possibility, not suicide the remote way of escape, but suicide the close and intimate friend, the healer of all woes, the solace of all griefs—suicide, the speedy, accurate solver of the worst problem destiny can put to man. ”

“ With such an impractical, childish mother and failure of a father, uncongenial brothers and sisters, almost hating each other, with bad heredity on both sides and a hellish environment, a shy nervous, suspicious disposition, extremes of ecstasy and despair, ungratified passions, alone and friendless, how could I end otherwise than a suicide?
I claim that any man who commits suicide of necessity suffers more than any who continues to live. I don’t want to die. ”

“ Last night I attempted suicide, but my good angel prevailed. To-night is my hour, and the power of darkness. Will he feel no touch of remorse when he beholds his neglected son—lost—bleeding—dying at his feet? ”

“ He returned to the front of the house, shambling like a somnambulist. Seated on the porch steps, head in hands, he slipped into a hell of regrets. He knew now that his suicide had been no hallucination. He was dead, all right; and this must be hell or purgatory.
Bitterly he cursed his drinking, that had led him to such a mad thing as suicide. ”

“ Was suicide the only means of escape from an agony to which on earth there seemed no term? If, driven by despair, she were to hurry unbidden into the presence of her Maker, might she not hope to be forgiven? If your cross is too heavy for your strength, sure you may be pardoned for casting it aside! ”

“ Is it possible to imagine a condition more melancholy, more hopeless, more calculated to drive to suicide the hapless victim of circumstances, beyond his—beyond any man's ontrol? It has had the effect ere now. The torturing doubt, the hope deferred, has resulted in the dread, irrevocable step. ”

“ Do you know I believe that poor boy will yet kill himself, for last November when I in my grief and anger told his relations about our marriage he was so frightened, hurt, and angry that he wanted us both; to kill ourselves. I acquiesced gladly in this proposal to commit suicide, but he backed out in a day or two. I am glad now that Will is alive, and am glad that I am alive, even with the prospect of years of imprisonment before me, but which I will cheerfully endure for his sake. ”

“ It was impossible for him to imagine suicide as proceeding from any cause but insanity, and what could have produced the disorder in one who had no cares or anxieties, everything she wanted, and nothing to trouble her, a devoted husband, and a happy home? ”

“ Some indefinable power drove me towards the idea of ridding myself of life somehow or other. Indeed, the thought of suicide became so attractive that I had to use artifice against it so as not immediately to put it into execution. ”

“ In some of its aspects, suicide raises psychological questions which bristle with difficulties, but which, nevertheless, pique the curiosity and demand explanatory answers. Why, for example, is the rate of suicide strictly dependent everywhere upon season and weather? Why is the tendency to self-destruction lessened by war? What is the explanation of suicide in the face of impending death, when there is still a fair chance of escape, or when the natural death that is threatened would involve less suffering than the act of self-destruction? ”

“ His confinement had at first deeply affected his spirits, and his melancholy increasing at the prospect of a long detention, terminated in deranging his mind, and occasioned this last act of despair.—I never hear of suicide without a compassion mingled with terror, for, perhaps, simple pity is too light an emotion to be excited by an event which reminds us, that we are susceptible of a degree of misery too great to be borne—too strong for the efforts of instinct, reflection, and religion. ”

“ They took care not to contradict the rumours of suicide from despair circulating in the great world, which remembered the interesting love-match, the charming and frank happiness brought to an end by death. ”

“ By dint of constantly dwelling on the idea that tranquillity was death, and if punishment were the end in view other tortures than death must be invented, he began to reflect on suicide. Unhappy he, who, on the brink of misfortune, broods over ideas like these! ”

“ Die, if you will, but don’t make others die. Suicides like that which is on the brink of accomplishment here are sublime; but suicide is narrow, and does not admit of extension; and as soon as it touches your neighbors, suicide is murder. ”

“ But it seems probable that in the minds of many suicides there has been, below any religious faith, or philosophical dogma, the deeply-rooted conviction that death was a sleep and permanent rest, an eternal oblivion in the grave, and they consequently came to regard it as the grand solatium for present heart-breaking grief of mind, or intolerable pain of body. ”

“ The principle of suicide, the principle which would teach us, upon some occasions, to consider that violent action as an object of applause and approbation, seems to be altogether a refinement of philosophy.53 Nature, in her sound and healthful state, seems never to prompt us to suicide. There is, indeed, a species of melancholy (a disease to which human nature, among its other calamities, is unhappily subject) which seems to be accompanied with, what one may call, an irresistible appetite for self-destruction. ”

“ I think that the mind of the modern suicide is generally filled, saturated with the idea. I believe that he or she has been given for a long time preceding the act to considering, sometimes facetiously, sometimes sentimentally, the advantages of oblivion. For a long time an infiltration of desire of oblivion, and acute realization of the folly of living, precedes suicide, and, when the mind is thoroughly prepared, a slight shock or interruption in the course of life produces it, just as an odorous wind, a sight of the sea, results in the poem which has been collecting in the mind. ”

“ That they could ever have got out of the awful trap, with its millions of strong spines barbed like fish-hooks and as strong as steel, is probably impossible; but the magnificent promptitude of the suicide, its picturesque completeness, was undeniable. ”

“ I have well-authenticated cases in which men or women have committed suicide by hanging themselves, or taking poison, in the tops of high trees; by throwing themselves upon swiftly revolving circular saws; by exploding dynamite in their mouths; by thrusting red-hot pokers down their throats; by hugging red-hot stoves; by stripping themselves naked and allowing themselves to freeze to death on winter snow-drifts out of doors, or on piles of ice in refrigerator-cars ”

“ A suicide inspired by passion is the inevitable termination of a pathological condition. Every individual who commits suicide had to commit suicide. You are merely the incidental cause of an accident, which is, of course, deplorable, but the importance of which should not be exaggerated. ”

“ But few patients are constantly determined to commit suicide. The opportunity offered, as a bath-room door left open, a rope, a knife, often prompts the desire and allows the accomplishment of the deed.
Attendants must remember that it takes but a few minutes to commit suicide, by drowning or hanging—but a moment to cut the throat; that persons can drown themselves in a pail of water, hang themselves by the hem of the sheets, cut their throat with a piece of glass or tin. ”

“ It is death from SUICIDE. Yes! thou poor degraded creature, who art daily lifting the poisoned bowl to thy lips, cease to avoid the unhallowed ground [349] in which the self-murderer is interred, and wonder no longer that the sun should shine, and the rain fall, and the grass look green upon his grave. Thou art perpetrating gradually, by the use of ardent spirits, what he has effected suddenly, by opium, or a halter. ”

“ From the lowest pit of despair, his soul debates the question of suicide as a logical proposition, forgetting the divine prohibition against 'self-slaughter.' Eloquence, genius, and brilliant fancies, are constantly manifested, and also a gorgeous imagination. ”

“ Both may be simply described as consumption of the body by its own organs; precisely as if, to preserve life, one devoured his own flesh and drank his own blood. Not without reason, therefore, the suicide, what time he thinks of his crime, always, when possible, chooses some mode easier and more expeditious. ”

“ But in reality, suicide, except in those cases where it is due to some temporary aberration of the intellect, is merely an inconsiderate act to protect one's life against certain dangers that threaten it. The suicide throws himself into the arms of death because he dreads some impending physical or emotional disturbances ”

“ Among the very copious existing literature on suicide I must mention Morselli’s monograph, Il Suicidio, in which the various causes—cosmic, ethnic, social, biological, and psychological—are studied in great detail. His principal theoretical conclusions are— (1) Among all civilised nations suicide increases more rapidly than the geometrical ratio of the population and the general mortality; (2) suicides are in inverse proportion to homicides at any given time or in any given country. ”

“ And scores of scarcely noticed paragraphs in our daily papers, brief tales of single or double suicide, present us with a dim outline of how—even 118 in the mean conditions and surroundings of our modern days—every now and then there comes to one or other a longing, a passion, and a revelation of a desire so intense, that, breaking the bounds of a useless life, it demands swift utterance in death. ”

“ The thought that extreme suffering is a key which unlocks life’s deepest and truest meanings is the final rejoinder to the plea on behalf of suicide. It is a thought which, when fully apprehended, is calculated to give peace to every troubled soul. ”

“ But these, as actually resulting in suicide, are very exceptional and infrequent. In most cases life is thrown away impatiently and peevishly, a sudden impulse of remorse or grief nerving the victim to forget how grand life really is, with its earnest aims and hearty work, and how bright it is with its e very-day home affections and its cheerful hopes of better things and better times. ”

“ Every suicide is an example of the same frame of mind which impels the soldier to commit suicide before the battle, for fear that he may be shot during the day—consequently a proof, not of weariness of life nor of indifference to death, but of exactly the opposite sentiments. ”

“ And in our own day the vivid representation of suicide upon the stage under conditions appealing forcibly to the imagination has been known to be followed by the self-imposed death of persons whose conditions resembled closely those of the suicide in the drama. ”

“ I knew from my law experience that suicide is either a desperate impulse or a cold-blooded and calculated finality. A man who kills himself while dressing comes under the former classification, and will usually seize the first method at hand. ”

“ But to have it thus in visible record, open to the world’s eye—intolerable! Many a man case-hardened otherwise to conscience or reproof has fled to suicide before that unwavering finger and relentless condemnation. ”

“ A shot, a cry, a struggle, and a fainting woman's kiss;
Life's blood let 'mid the grasses—and all a world was lost,
And no one may ever know how he paid the cost.
He is lost in the crowd of the dead, in the night-time of death,
A name on a stone left to tell that he ever drew breath.
So desperate body die there, with your soul's long release,
And, unhappy spirit, God grant you Eternity's peace! ”

“ The ultimate of this picture is death from unrecognized suicide; death, a slow dying to every sense that made life worth living. There is this about these deaths that go on through the months and years: they{111} exaggerate the worst instincts of the soul as it is dragged down—down through brain-wasting largely avoidable if only understood. ”

“ Just because mental pain, being much greater, makes us insensible to physical pain, suicide is very easy to the person who is in despair, or who is consumed by morbid depression, even though formerly, in comfortable circumstances, he recoiled at the thought of it. ”

“ Under public causes he classes suicide to save public honour of a government, to avenge the disgrace of one’s country, to defend the honour of others, and suicide in despair of the state of public affairs. ”

“ And things worse than suicide, that suicide of self-respect which turns men to drugs and inflammatory vices and the utmost outrageous defiance of the dreaming noble self that has been so despitefully used. ”