Thomas Bernhard Quotes

Everyone has good cause for suicide, or at least it seems that way to those who search for it. (74)

Suicide: Don't knock it if you ain't tried it.

I would feel real trapped in this life if I didn't know I could commit suicide at any time.

No matter what anyone says, suicide takes guts. It's for heroes and martyrs, truly vainglorious men. Archie was none of these. He was a man whose significance in the Greater Scheme of Things could be figured along familiar ratios: Pebble : Beach Raindrop : Ocean Needle : Haystack

That's the thing about suicide. Try as you might to remember how a person lived his life, you always end up thinking about how he ended it.

I really wanted to die at certain periods in my life.

I can't even remember how many times I tried to kill myself.

One said of suicide, As long as one has brains one should not blow them out. And another answered, But when one has ceased to have them, too often one cannot.

The idea of suicide is of a very set narrative, as if killing yourself is a definitive statement. But it can be just as meaningless as throwing a stone in a river.

There is something great and terrible about suicide.

Nine men in ten are would be suicides.

There was a moment in my life when I really wanted to kill myself. And there was one other moment when I was close to that. But even in my most jaded times, I had some hope.

The man, who in a fit of melancholy, kills himself today, would have wished to live had he waited a week.

When you commit your life to something and it doesn't work out, it is a tough place to be. Suicide can be the spiritual reprieve of a faithless person. I knew I could always just end it, and there was solace in that.

The absence of the will to live is, alas, not sufficient to make one want to die.

I'm glad that I never ended up killing myself, though I came close more times than I would like to admit.

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

All my life I have had the utmost admiration for suicides. I have always considered them superior to me in every way.

It (suicide) became a possibility like Maybe when I grow up, I will be dead. Life was a cake that looked good on the bakery shelf but turned to sawdust and salt when I ate it.

I have at times tried to imagine the despair which leads to suicide, attempted to conjure up the slew and slop of darkness in which only death appears as a pinprick of light: in other words, the exact opposite of the normal condition of life.

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.

Killing myself was a matter of such indifference to me that I felt like waiting for a moment when it would make some difference.

On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide- it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese- the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.

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

I think suicide is the most perfect thing you can do in life.