“The experience of my five years made me feel that things were futile so I decided that if I bumped down the stone kitchen steps from top to bottom … I would probably be dead at the end. I did not succeed … As I went on in life, I made two other efforts to put an end to things, only to discover it is a very difficult thing to commit suicide. All of these attempts were made before I was fifteen. I tried to smother myself with sand when I was around eleven years old, but sand in one's mouth, nose and eyes is not comfortable and I decided to postpone the happy day… But again the instinct to self-preservation was too strong. Since then I have not been very interested in suicide, though I have always understood the impulse.”

Source: The Unfinished Autobiography (1951), Chapter I, Part 1

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The experience of my five years made me feel that things were futile so I decided that if I bumped down the stone kitch…" by Alice A. Bailey?
Alice A. Bailey photo
Alice A. Bailey 109
esoteric, theosophist, writer 1880–1949

Related quotes

Margaret Atwood photo
Thomas Bailey Aldrich photo

“All the best sands of my life are somehow getting into the wrong end of the hourglass. If I could only reverse it! Were it in my power to do so, would I?”

Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836–1907) American poet, novelist, editor

Leaves From a Notebook, Ponkapog Papers (1903) p. 29.

Jeanette Winterson photo
Kent Hovind photo
Margaret Atwood photo

“After a year or two of keeping my head down and trying to pass myself off as a normal person, I made contact with the five other people at my university who were interested in writing”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

On Writing Poetry (1995)
Context: After a year or two of keeping my head down and trying to pass myself off as a normal person, I made contact with the five other people at my university who were interested in writing; and through them, and some of my teachers, I discovered that there was a whole subterranean Wonderland of Canadian writing that was going on just out of general earshot and sight

Carl Panzram photo
Mark Satin photo

“I turn out the kitchen light and sit down at the kitchen table, my head buried in my arms. I try to tell myself that I feel sick from having had to write all those lies on my application. I'd commit suicide if I really saw myself as Keith's "assistant"! But I know that isn't the half of it…. If I do "choose to finish my B. A." I'll end up like Keith. But if I don't "choose" school I'll end up in Canada! And if I don't "choose" either – wouldn't I end up in Vietnam?”

Mark Satin (1946) American political theorist, author, and newsletter publisher

Pages 196–97. Fall of 1966. Satin has dropped out of SUNY and is sitting in his girlfriend's apartment in Manhattan. The application is for Canadian immigrant status. Keith, a supportive college professor, is seen by Satin as a plastic sellout.
Confessions of a Young Exile (1976)

B.F. Skinner photo

“I did not direct my life. I didn’t design it. I never made decisions. Things always came up and made them for me. That’s what life is.”

B.F. Skinner (1904–1990) American behaviorist

As quoted in "Unpacking the Skinner Box : Revisiting B. F. Skinner through a Postformal Lens" by Dana Salter in The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology Vol. 4 (2008) edited by Joe L. Kincheloe and Raymond A. Horn, Ch. 99, p. 872.

Roberto Clemente photo

Related topics