When even despair ceases to serve any creative purpose, then surely we are justified in suicide.

Comedians are the nearest to suicide.

The question is whether [suicide] is the way out, or the way in.

On July 2, 1961, a writer whom many critics call the greatest writer of this century, a man who had a zest for life and adventure as big as his genius, a winner of the Nobel Prize and the Pulitzer Prize, a soldier of fortune with a home in Idaho's Sawtooth Mountains, where he hunted in the winter, an apartment in New York, a specially rigged yacht to fish the Gulf Stream, an available apartment at the Ritz in Paris and the Gritti in Venice, a solid marriage, no serious physical ills, good friends everywhere-on that July day, that man [Hemingway], the envy of other men, put a shotgun to his head and killed himself.

No sane society chooses to commit national suicide.

In China your father had a sister who killed herself. She jumped into the family well. We say that your father has all brothers because it is as if she had never been born.

When all the blandishments of life are gone, The coward sneaks to death, the brave live on.

Why dost thou complain of this world? It detains thee not; thy own cowardice is the cause, if thou livest in pain.

Razors pain you; Rivers are damp; Acids stain you; And drugs cause cramp. Guns aren't lawful; Nooses give; Gas smells awful; You might as well live.

The journey over the bridge had unnerved me. The river water passed me by like an untouched drink. I suspected that even if my mother and brother had not been there I would have made no move to jump.