"‘Life was not going fast enough in me, I am speeding it up. The curve was sagging, I am filling it out again. I am a man, I am the master of my body, I am proving it.’
Well wedged up, pillows piled behind the head, feet against the bottom of the bed, well braced. The chest thrust upwards, well exposed. One knows where one’s heart is.
A revolver is solid, it is made of steel. It is an object. To come up against an object at last."

"Suicide is the means of men whose resilience has been eaten away by rust, the rust of the daily round. They were born for action, but they have delayed their action; so action turns back on them with the swing of a pendulum. Suicide is an act, the act of those who have not been able to accomplish others. It is an act of faith, like all acts. Faith in one’s neighbor, in the existence of one’s neighbor, in the reality of the self and the other selves."

"On the one hand, though life is what I want, there is something I want more than life. That is why I do not cling to life at all cost. On the other hand, though death is what I loathe, there is something I loathe more than death. That is why there are dangers I do not avoid. Yet there are ways of remaining alive and ways of avoiding death to which a person will not resort. In other words, there are things a person wants more than life and there are also things he or she loathes more than death."

"Their world is closed to me, decidedly closed. And it is there that women are. There is nothing to be said against the world of men and women. It is a world of brutes. And if I kill myself, it is because I’m not a successful brute. But the rest, thought, literature, oh! I shall kill myself because I have been wounded on that side by an abominable lie. Lies, lies. They know that no truth is possible, and yet they speak of it. They speak of it, the bastards."

"For life itself is no solution, life has no kind of existence which is chosen, consented to, and self-determined. It is a mere series of hungers and adverse forces, of petty contradictions which succeed or miscarry according to the circumstances of an odious gamble."

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

"I can neither live nor die, nor am I capable of not wishing to die or live. And all mankind resembles me."

"After all, we are only trees and is probably written in some crook or other of my family tree that I shall kill myself on a given day."

"Goodbye, my friend, goodbye
My love, you are in my heart.
It was preordained we should part
And be reunited by and by.
Goodbye: no handshake to endure.
Let’s have no sadness—furrowed brow.
There’s nothing new in dying now
Though living is no newer."

"Does life please you? Live on. Does it not? Go from whence you came. No vast wound is necessary; a mere puncture will secure your liberty. It is a bad thing (you say) to be under the necessity of living; but there is no necessity in the case. Thanks be to the gods, nobody can be compelled to live."