David Foster Wallace Quotes

Delia's arms were inscribed with a grid of self- inflicted wounds, an intricate text of self-loathing

I stopped. She was bleeding after all. Perfect lines crossed her wrists, not near any crucial veins, but enough to leave wet red tracks across her skin. She hadn;t hit her veins when she did this; death hadn't been her goal.

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

My death from the wrists, two name tags, blood worn like a corsage to bloom one on the left and one on the right.

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

Suicides are timid murderers. Masochism instead of Sadism.

He went home one evening and drank three cups of tea with three lumps of sugar in each cup, cut his jugular with a razor three times and scrawled on a photograph of his wife with his dying hand goodbye, goodbye, goodbye

Time destroyed Is suicide, where more than blood is spilt.

I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.

I hit my head against the wall because I don't want to know all the terrible things that I know about. I don't want to feel all these wretched things, but they're in me already. If I don't get rid of them, I'm not ever going to feel anything else.

I slowly climbed back to my feet, walked back into the emergency department through the silently swishing glass doors, and, covered in my girlfriend's blood, lied perfectly for the first time in my life. "I tried to stop her.

Suicide is a belated acquiescence in the opinion of one's wife's relatives.

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

The thought of killing myself had slowed me down to five miles per hour. The thought of killing someone else stopped me completely.

Think of the old cliché about ‘the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.’ This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head.

What kills a person at twenty-five? Leukemia. An accident. But George knows the better odds are that someone who passes at that age dies of unhappiness. Drug overdose. Suicide. Reckless behavior.

I am so sorry. I wish you knew even one tenth of one percent of how sorry I am. ...It was my fault. Can I kill myself here, or should I do it outside, so the mess on your carpet doesn't upset your mother?

Blood transforms the warm bath water and, in it, I see weakly that this was a mistake. The razor's cut is not deep, nevertheless the blood rushes out happily in the warm water as if kin to it, the same tender substance. Rising a new person transformed with an icy sense of error I go to the sink and turn on cold water which is not friendly to blood. The cut is deeper than imagined.

Suicide to them is an act of selfishness. Someone who is truly selfless does not think of himself often enough to desire death.

I tried to commit suicide because I sacrificed everything for Hitler. And that man whom we sacrificed everything for left us all alone. If he had committed suicide four years before, it would have been all right.

You're dealing with people who are suiciding slowly. You've got to get to the bottom of what is psychologically motivating them to self-destruct.

I'll put a bullet through my own brain. Let alone wait for stark to do it. Your sister will drive me to it, Howard. No offense.

The private terror of the liberal spirit is invariably suicide, not murder.

There is no power on earth that can loosen a man's grip on his own throat