“I have a paper cut from writing my suicide note. [sighs] It's a start…”
When the Leaves Blow Away (2006), I Still Have a Pony (2007)
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Steven Wright 178
American actor and author 1955Related quotes
“I always start writing with a clean piece of paper and a dirty mind.”
Source: 1960s, Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs (1966), p. 431
“sup? i'm working. on what? my suicide note. i can't figure out how to end it. lol”
Source: Will Grayson, Will Grayson
Girl, Interrupted (1994)
Context: It’s important to cultivate detachment. One way to do this is to practice imagining yourself dead, or in the process of dying. If there’s a window, you must imagine your body falling out the window. If there’s a knife, you must imagine the knife piercing your skin. If there’s a train coming, you must imagine your torso flattened under its wheels. These exercises are necessary to achieving the proper distance. The motive is paramount. Without a strong motive, you’re sunk. My motives were weak: an American-history paper I didn’t want to write and the question I’d asked months earlier, Why not kill myself? Dead, I wouldn’t have to write the paper. Nor would I have to keep debating the question.
Japan, the Beautiful and Myself (1969)
Context: I have an essay with the title "Eyes in their Last Extremity".
The title comes from the suicide note of the short-story writer Akutagawa Ryunosuke... It is the phrase that pulls at me with the greatest strength. Akutagawa said that he seemed to be gradually losing the animal something known as the strength to live, and continued:
"I am living in a world of morbid nerves, clear and cold as ice... I do not know when I will summon up the resolve to kill myself. But nature is for me more beautiful than it has ever been before. I have no doubt that you will laugh at the contradiction, for here I love nature even when I am contemplating suicide. But nature is beautiful because it comes to my eyes in their last extremity."
Akutagawa committed suicide in 1927, at the age of thirty-five.
In my essay, "Eyes in their Last Extremity", I had to say: "How ever alienated one may be from the world, suicide is not a form of enlightenment. However admirable he may be, the man who commits suicide is far from the realm of the saint." I neither admire nor am in sympathy with suicide.
“I see in the papers where Roy Guthrie committed suicide. Why, I wonder?”
From a letter to Tevis Clyde Smith (October 5, 1923)
Letters
Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground (2002)