best/worst or worst/best movie

H. G. Wells' and 1976's Food of the Gods: giant wasps, earthworms, chickens, and rats! What more could one want?!

stinky puppies ho(sed)!

Here's a description of my new volunteer job. I would've never thought there was such a thing as this!

Puppy Washers

Overview: We want our pups to be squeaky clean before being presented to the public for an adoption day. Puppy washers help to achieve this.

More Detail: After spending 72 hours in state-mandated isolation, the puppies are often stinky. This isolation does not allow them to be outside of their cage or even in the outside runs at all. We wash each puppy before taking them to participate in adoption days.

Wash, dry, and kiss stinky puppies!

starfish...and worms...and caterpillars

"Making a Difference"

One day a man was walking along the seashore. He noticed that during the night many seashells and starfish had washed up on the shore. Thoroughly enjoying the morning sun and cool sea air, the man strolled for miles along the sand.

Far off in the distance, he saw a small figure dancing. The man was joyous that someone was celebrating life in such a grand and uninhibited manner. As he drew closer, however, it became apparent that perhaps the figure was not dancing but was repeatedly performing some ritual.

Approaching the small figure, the man noticed that it was a child. The girl was methodically picking up starfish from the shore and tossing them back into the surf. The man paused for a moment, puzzled, then asked, "Why are you throwing those starfish?"

"If I leave these starfish on the beach," she replied, "the sun will dry them, and they will die. So I'm throwing them back into the ocean because I want them to live."

The man was silent for a moment, impressed with the child's thoughtfulness. Then he motioned up and down the miles and miles of beach and said, "There must be millions of starfish along here! How can you possibly expect to make a difference?"

The young girl pondered the man's words for a moment, then she slowly leaned over, reached down, and carefully picked up another starfish from the sand. Pulling back, she arched the starfish gently into the surf.

She turned to the man and smiled. "You may be right," she said, "but I made a difference for that one!"

my brothers and sister: 1973-ish

The picture of us children is from around 1973 or so, though I'm not sure. Mary's got us all beat on cuteness here, I think!

L to R: Fred, Jamie, Mary, Carroll

Requiescat In Pace, "T-Rix"

My nephew Cameron borrowed his mother's car today and pulled out of the driveway to see my girl (in fact, Mary's cat) Trixie lying dead in the road...I suppose from having been hit by a car...I always knew that something bad would happen because of that close, busy road in front of Mary's house. I'm really sad about Trixie, and especially will be when I go back to Biloxi to visit. Trixie was my girl, enough so that I gave her her own personal rap name, "T-Rix." ;-) but moreso :'-(

Any time I went over to my sister's house, the first (and last) thing I did was track Trixie down, which could be difficult, given that she liked to lie in weeds, flowers, bushes, the clothes dryer, etc. And she was the only cat I knew who could meow without making a sound, or, at most, no more than a squeak. Trixie had a little head on a lumpy squishy body, just like me, so maybe that's why I liked her so much!

"burnish it" or "burn that shit"?

My father apparently has a piece of rusted metal in his eye (?!). Since it's rusted, the metal piece can't just be pulled out. So my mother said they were going to "burnish it out." I thought she said that they were going to "burn that shit out." She laughed and laughed.

I suppose "burnishing" is a lot less traumatic than what I thought was going to happen!

my family...1980-ish

The picture of all of us is from around 1980, give or take one year.

L to R: Fred, Jim, Jamie, Jane, Carroll, Mary

drugs and legs

Heard on TV this sunny Monday morning:

"Requip (ropinirole HCl) helped me make peace with my legs." I suppose some wampum was exchanged and a peace pipe smoked between the woman and her legs.

Good news, seriously I know, for those with restless leg syndrome, but unintentionally funny for the rest of us!

Jamie

I figure I ought to put a picture of my brother Jamie up (some have said he and I looked alike). He'd be 40 in August, two weeks before Jerry'll turn the same age. Jamie's 16 in this picture, in 1982, 10th grade at Biloxi, MS High School. This was 6 years before he was hurt while co-oping at NASA in Virginia, and 9 years before he finally died, of heart failure, in Slidell, Lousiana.

I asked my mother once what it was like to have a daughter who was 40. And I remembered she'd asked her parents the same thing once, except about what it was like to have a 70-year-old daughter!

Then my mother told me that she met someone once and told her that story. The woman responded by saying, "That's nothing: my mother's 80 and her mother is still alive!"

current Maine highway project or new horror movie?

On the way to Freeport, Maine this morning, Jerry and I were fixin' to go through a toll booth when we saw a state sign, letting people know about an upcoming interstate project. The sign said, "Think Ahead: The Widening."

We both laughed and Jerry said, "That sounds like a new Stephen King book." Then he guffawed, grabbed my hand, and said, "I guess that's (the widening, that is) what's been happening to me the last twenty years!"

my grandparents

This picture is one my mother especially likes, because my grandparents seem so happy and comfortable with each other, something that wasn't always the case as they became older. In this (1993) picture, my grandmother is, or is almost, 86. My grandfather is soon to be 88. They both (Carroll Hardy Long, after whom I'm named, and Lucinda Ann Strong) lived well into their 90s. My grandmother died 10-, and my grandfather 8-, years later.

I've always been sorry that I didn't learn more about my grandparents, but I was too shy, and a bit cowed by them, to ask more. I regret that, of course.

turning 30 and into my mother

Someone recently asked me about some conversations I had with various people in Chicago, and if I remembered any of those conversations standing out in my memory. One did: talking about how I felt about turning 30.

It didn't bother me to turn 40, other than to think some, I imagine, common things to all of us climbing the ladder into middle age, like, "I remember turning 30 and it's already 10 years later," and, "I can't believe it's been almost 20 years since I graduated from college."

While growing up, I never thought of my parents as being a certain age, never comparing my age in relation to theirs. They were just my parents, something different from what I was. I knew that when I was grown up like them, I'd be different than what I was at that point. Later on I realized, of course, that they were regular people, just like me. Still, it was hard to really believe that.

Obviously, once I got older, I realized that my parents were people just like me. I didn't become a different person when I went from 10 to 20, 20 to 30, or 30 to 40. My life was different, but I thought the same things, in pretty much the same ways. My looks changed, unfortunately!, but otherwise I was the same as I always was.

The point where the above dawned on me most emphatically was right before I turned 30, in 1994...30 being the age my mother was, of course, when I was born. That's why I felt _____ (I don't know what word to use there) when I turned 30. In a way, I felt that I was becoming my mother (for lack of a more insightful way to put that)...not in the sense that I was becoming a homemaker, or a musician, or a whatever. It was that I now knew what it was to be what I never thought that they were before...again, regular people, just like me.

Anyway, I knew at 30 that I was officially grown up, and I knew then what it felt like to be my mother or to be the age of someone who was, in her case, or could be, in my case, a mother. It didn't feel any different than when I was 10.

(The picture of me is when I was 7, in first grade. The picture of my mother is the only one I have scanned of her. She's probably only a senior in high school when that picture was taken.)

new super power discovered!

To add to my earlier list, here's my newly discovered super power!

5. guessing birthdays/ages

Jerry was looking at a book, showed me a picture, and asked,

Jerry: "Do you know who this is"?
Carroll: "Ho Chi Minh."
Jerry: "Do you know when he was born?"
Carroll: I had no idea, but thought about it for a few seconds and said, "1890."
Jerry: looked dismayed and said, "Yeah."

mother's saying

I know more than a couple of people, who might read this, have already had this exclamation made to them. Here it is, yet again, in another context, from today:




Carroll: Well aren't YOU something?!
Jerry: I am something. No one knows quite what, but there you go.

No, there YOU go.

one more thing about the garage...

...see the "hen pecked" post a couple of posts down for the back story...

All the stuff in my father's current garage (he's got at least three arc welders, four motorcycles, two jet skis, and two four wheelers) used to be in the house's regular two-car garage. Every morning it was a huge undertaking to move all that stuff (at least, at the time, there were no jet skis or four wheelers yet) out into the driveway, so that my father could move around in the garage.

My mother and father tell of the numerous times people would stop by to (in all seriousness) ask, "When's the garage sale?"!

(In the picture, there's much, much more stuff in there now!)

He has so much stuff, in fact, that, at his 70th birthday party last month, one of his friends bet the other friends that he (the friend) had gotten a gift that my father didn't have out in his garage. There were peals of disbelieving laughter from the men, but it turned out that it was something my father didn't have...some soft of hose cutter.

John 11:25

I can't believe I'm quoting something from the Bible. Since I admit I am, I like the following, because of its being etched on my great-grandfather's (Edwin Augustus Long, my maternal grandfather's father) tomb, in Johnson City, Tennessee. He, and his son and daughter in law) was a life-long Methodist there, and so I respect his devotion to his religion.

"...I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live..."

• John 11:25

70...the 8th decade

It was hard for me when my mother turned 70, two years ago. Even though her parents lived till their mid 90s, I still felt depressed about the change from her being in her 60s, versus beginning her 70s.

It's hard to explain why I felt that way, since I'm not sure myself. I imagine it was because I'm so used to the reality that the average life span for us IS somewhere in the 70s. Though I know women tend to live a bit past that, I couldn't help feeling like 70 marked, in a way, the beginning of the last phase, or decade, of my mother's life. Maybe it will and maybe it won't. I don't want to find out.

I've felt a little less anxious since then, but still feel sad when I see obituary pages, and their columns and columns of men and women who've died, as the averages say, in their 70s.

as a child...

...I was a cowboy, first and foremost (I always had my boots, hat, and guns on, though with a dress I only wore my boots), then Batman (complete with cape, helmet, and care).

Then I decided I would go out, with my rope and bag, and go to the end of the rainbow (it was out that day), to get the gold. I didn't get very far...that rainbow end was a long way off! ;-D

Christmas gifts...of sorts

My father isn't the most in-tune gift giver to my mother, though he tries hard, I know. Here are a few examples of Christmas gifts over the years from him to her:

• a mailbox made out of checker plate (aka diamond plate)
Actually, it's pretty cool looking, and is the only one on the block, indubitably!

• floor mats for her van
Need I say more?

• and the greatest of all time...
One Christmas my grandparents were down and we were all unwrapping presents. My father was very excited and kept hinting that we all needed to go out to see my mother's gift from him. It was a big production, since we had to parade down the street, to a friend's house (see post below...Tom is one who brings up the "hen pecked" idea often), where the gift was stealthily hidden.

My father went around back, and as proud as could be, emerged with a metal cart, with four bicycle wheels attached: it was a three-can garbage-can holder!!! I don't remember what my mother's reaction was, but her mother quickly exclaimed, "Where can *I* get one?!" She was serious.

hen pecked or not...you be the judge.

My father's friends tell him that he's hen pecked by my mother, an accusation she strongly refutes. Here's an example that she uses to deny that she's not a hen pecker; instead she's just standing up for herself and her yard...something like that...

After building a giant garage (see the picture above) in our back yard, my father set to building a smaller shed on the other side of the yard. He and his friend worked on it all day and finally got it all set up. Later that day, my sister Mary saw the shed, and the only thing that uttered forth from her was, "Momma's not going to like that."

My mother arrived home that evening and asked how the shed turned out. Mary said ominously, "Uh, you better go look at it." My mother and Mary went outside with a flashlight and were horrified to find out that they couldn't see the top of the shed, even with the flashlight. Turns out that the shed was 10 feet wide and long, but over 20 feet tall!!! I'm not sure if my mother cried, but she did come in and say, to me in a non-hen-pecked way, "Jim, that just won't DO. You KNEW I wouldn't like that." I kidded, at my father's 70th birthday party this April, when my mother recounted this tale, that that shed could've been used to store grain or hang tobacco.

Well, the shed was trimmed down the next day, and is now as you see it in the picture above.

Final "hen pecked?" verdict? The men vote "yes," and the women vote "no."

Oh, and a hen-pecked related joke my father likes to tell:

"I'm so hen pecked that when I go to the bathroom at night, I put my foot in the toilet and pee down the side of my leg, so that I won't wake Jane!"

That's bad, Daddy. Bad Daddy.

(headed to) home sweet home

to Biloxi, that is (from Mobile)...and in a nicer van...

...to be wrecked within the year...by me

my father's van

No words can describe this, and this is just the front of the van...and before Mary had to use that baseball cap to block off the uncovered air conditioning vent! Also, this is with the van's looking pretty decent. There's half a garage in the back now.

(Click the picture to see a more true-to-life representation: it's not nice!)



This is my mother, sister, and I headed to New Orleans on a blazing day. I think the Dodge Caravan was leaking fluid. So we took the Safari buckboard...good for a million laughs.

$, or Daddy War-----

The other night Jerry looked down at my shoes and made a face. Here's how the "situation" played out:

Carroll: "What? They're white bucks."
Jerry: "Well, they sure aren't nubucks."

Ba dum ching! Good one...get it? nubucks/new bucks

(I do need to bleach out the grey shoelaces.)

Andy 'n' Goober

"Andy, Goober says 'hey.'"

"'Hey' to Goober."

Godzilla (or Mothra)?

Last night I stumbled through both the cats' water bowl and food bowl, prompting Jerry to say:

"I've never, literally never, met anyone so little in touch with their own limbs."

He's called me "Mothra" before, because of my driving one time, so I guess I'm moving up!

When I asked last night if I were "Mothra" or "Godzilla," I was told (as I can best remember it), "Your mind might be 'Mothra' at times, but you're pretty much 'Godzilla' now."

names my mother calls me

No bad ones:

I've been Carroll, Mary, Fred, Cameron, Jim, Hardy, Frances, and Edwin. Maybe even Jamie at some point.
But it's about 60% "Carroll" and 40% "Mary," though it might even be closer to 50/50.

On the phone, it's usually "Honey Bun" or "Sugar Plum." When I was young she called me "Sister Sue," which I didn't like at all.

In the mid '70s, I somehow decided I wanted to be called "Frisbee." I know, I know...Jerry laughs, too. Anyhoo, when I got up the nerve to present that idea to my family, they all bursted out laughing! So "Frisbee" didn't go anywhere, much to my disappointment. I think I got over it pretty soon, though.

paw paws and purple cows

In Mrs. MacKeiver's Episcopal nursery school, my class sang:

"The Paw Paw Patch"
(I didn't know what a paw paw was until adulthood...and I still can't manage to remember what it is.)

Where, oh where is dear little Danny?
Where, oh where is dear little Danny?
Where, oh where is dear little Danny?
Way down yonder in the paw-paw patch.

Come on girls, let's go find him
Come on girls, let's go find him,
Come on girls, let's go find him
Way down yonder in the paw-paw patch.

Pickin' up paw-paws, put 'em in your pocket
Pickin' up paw-paws, put 'em in your pockets,
Pickin' up paw-paws, put 'em in your pockets,
Way down yonder in the paw-patch.

(and on and on with others' names in place of "Danny")

I recited this in Mrs. Cheek's Westminster Presbyterian kindergarten (I think my brother Jamie had to sing about vegetables...poor boy. His rendition probably put me off of vegetables forever):

Galloping, galloping, off we go,
my little black pony and I.
Galloping, galloping, off we go.
Yippity, yippity, yie.

And from Baker Elementary School chorus (I also had to draw a purple cow, and I think I remember white cotton fitting in somewhere!):

"Purple Cow"

I never saw a Purple Cow.
I never hope to see one.
But I can tell you, anyhow,
I'd rather see than be one.

• Gelett Burgess

no rhyme or reason...

...to these last three posts. Just trying to find something to put in my blog. It's a blah.blah.blog, after all.
These are very long, so feel free to skip over and scroll on down the page.


Night falls fast.
Today is the past.
Blown from the dark hill hither to my door
Three flakes, then four
Arrive, then many more.
• Edna St. Vincent Millay

The common purpose is to seek a solution.
The common goal is cessation of consciousness.
The common stimulus is unbearable psychological pain.
The common stressor is frustrated psychological needs.
The common emotion is hopelessness-helplessness.
The common cognitive state is ambivalence.
The common perceptual state is constriction.
The common action is escape.
The common interpersonal act is communication of intention.
The common consistency is consistency of lifelong styles.
• Edwin Shneidman

What a job is this, to measure lightning with a footrule, the heart's turbulence with a pair of callipers.
• Norman MacCaig

There are things you see that you can't unsee. They get in your head and stay there.
• "Max" in 8mm

Hope now,—not health, nor cheerfulness,
Since they can come and go again,
As often one brief hour witnesses,—
Just hope has gone forever.
• Edward Thomas

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.
• Dorothy Parker

The calm,
Cool face of the river
Asked me for a kiss.
• Langston Hughes

Unfortunately none of us can see far ahead; prophecy is not for us. Hence the paucity of suicides.
• Mark Twain

O, yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill,
To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood.
• Alfred, Lord Tennyson

But it is always a question whether I wish to avoid these glooms...
These 9 weeks give one a plunge into deep waters....
One goes down into the well & nothing protects one
from the assault of truth.
• Virginia Woolf

But suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.
• Anne Sexton

Of the demonstrably wise there are but two: those who commit suicide, & those who keep their reasoning faculties atrophied with drink.
• Mark Twain

In all miseries of our earthly life, to be able to compass one's own death is the best of God's gifts to man.
• Pliny

...Time does not heal,
It makes a half-stitched scar
That can be broken and again you feel
Grief as total as in its first hour.
• Elizabeth Jennings

Look to the living, love them, and hold on.
• Douglas Dunn

Suicide is the only sane thing the young or old ever do in this life.
• Mark Twain

The grim bottom line therefore is that suicide, in a double sense, will prove to be the death of the future.
• R. Diekstra

We might say that every human faces this dilemma: He cannot face death unless he is a whole person, yet he can become a truly whole person only by facing death.
• H. Searles

By death a person ceases to be involved in interpersonal relationships and he become a Thing which his fellow men bury in the ground. The act by which a person turns himself into a Thing is called suicide.
• A. H. Chapman

You see, the lightning refuses to strike me--that is where the defect is. We have to do our own striking, as Barney Bernato did. But nobody ever gets the courage till he goes crazy.
• Mark Twain

If suicide is allowed then everything is allowed. If anything is not allowed then suicide is not allowed. This throws light on the nature of ethics, for suicide is, so to speak, the elementary sin.
• L. Wittgenstein

Encompass'd with a thousand dangers
Weary, faint, trembling with a thousand
terrors....
I...in a fleshly tomb, am
Buried above ground.
• William Cowper

What is the fate of the survivors? They are hurt so. That is, the suicidal person puts his psychological skeleton in the survivor's closet. And that's a bitch to have in terms of your memory bank, all the time.
• Edwin Shneidman

I have been half in love with easeful Death.
• John Keats

I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.
• W. B. Yeats

The grief of the worshippers left behind,
the awful famine in their hearts,
these are too costly terms for the release.
• Mark Twain

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.
• Albert Camus

Had I not read somewhere that a man ought not of his own free will take away his life so long as he could still can perform a good action, I should long ago have been dead--and, indeed, by my own hand.
• Ludwig van Beethoven

There is only one liberty, to come to terms with death. after which everything is possible.
• Albert Camus

The stigma of self-inflicted death is for some people a hateful blot that demands erasure at all costs.
• William Styron

No man is psychologically complete unless he has meditated his own destruction.
• William James

I will not relinquish old age if it leaves my better part intact. But if it begins to shake my mind, if it destroys its faculties one by one, if it leaves me not life but breath, I will depart from the putrid or tottering edifice ... If I must suffer without hope of relief, I will depart.
• Seneca

I that in heill was and gladness
Am trublit now with great sickness
And feblit with infirmitie:—
Timor Mortis contubat me.
• William Dunbar

O when the pride of Graecia's noblest race
Wanders, as now, in darkness and disgrace,
When reason's day
Sets rayless—joyless—quenched in cold decay,
Better to die and sleep
The never waking sleep than linger on
And dare to live, when the soul's life is gone.
• Sophocles

The man who kills a man, kills a man.
The man who kills himself, kills all men.
As far as he is concerned he wipes out the world.
• G. K. Chesterton

It seems a law of nature that the race must pay a penalty for development, and while some develop others must degenerate, hence insanity and suicide must increase as civilization and material progress advance.
• John Chalmers Da Costa

Whoever is oppressed with the burden of life, whoever desires life and affirms it, but abhors its torments, such a man has no deliverance to hope from death, and cannot right himself by suicide.
• Arthur Schopenhauer


Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.
• Sylvia Plath

Free to die and free in death, able to say a holy No when the time for Yes has passed; thus he knows how to die and to live.
• Friedrich Nietzsche

We fear the thought of suicide, and yet we need to think rationally about it, if we can, because one of the characteristics of our time is precisely that it is a suicidal age.... For the well-to-do—and they are the ones most suicidal—there is comfort, security, no end of distraction, life should be livable and even happy.
• Thomas Merton

As I choose the ship in which I will sail, and the house I will inhabit, so I will choose the death by which I will leave life...The lot of man is happy because no one continues wretched but by his own fault.
• Seneca

In the morning of life the son tears himself loose from the mother, from the domestic hearth, to rise through battle to his destined heights. Always he imagines his worst enemy in front of him, yet he carries the enemy within himself—a deadly longing for the abyss, a longing to drown in his own source, to be sucked down to the realm of the Mothers. His life is a constant struggle against extinction, a violent yet fleeting deliverance from every-lurking night. This death is no external enemy, it is his own inner longing for the stillness and profound peace of all-knowing no-existence, for all-seeing sleep in the ocean of coming-to-be and passing away.
• C. G. Jung

But if I know that I must suffer without hope of relief, I will depart, not through fear of pain itself, but because it prevents all for which I would live.
• Seneca

If God were suddenly condemned to live the life which He has inflicted upon men, He would kill Himself.
• Alexandre Dumas, fils

I remember times when the inner disputation
Was quite fierce (to pursue the game, or sign
A full stop to pain). The call was mine—
Or so it seemed. Each voice a singular temptation:
The beguiling cries of long-for rest,
The easeful quiet, the total peace
—what a boon!—finally to cease
The struggle; to know that nothingness is best.
• ?

If one day, as well may happen, life grows wearisome, there only remains to pour a libation to death and oblivion. A drop of subtle poison will gently close your eyes to the sun, and waft you smiling into the eternal night whence everything comes and to which everything returns.
• Lucretius

Peturbation and lethality are the bad parents of human self-destruction.
• Edwin Shneidman

We have no power to prevent ourselves being born: but we can rectify this error—for it is sometimes an error. When one does away with oneself one does the most estimable things possible: one thereby almost deserves to live.
• Friedrich Nietzsche

Suicide is a tragic drama in the mind.
• Edwin Shneidman

Stretch me no longer in this rough world.
• Lear

For what is suicide but an action to put an end to intolerable emotions?
• Henry A. Murray

It takes far less courage to kill yourself than it takes to make yourself wake up one more time. It's harder to stay where you are than to get out. (For everyone but you, that is.)
• Judith Rossner

Since we can die but once, what matters it,
If rope or garter, poison, pistol, sword,
Slow-wasting sickness, or the sudden burst
Of valve arterial in the noble parts,
Curtail the miseries of human life?
Though varied is the cause, the effect's the same:
All to one common dissolution tends.
• Thomas Chatterton

Do I deserve credit
for not having tried suicide—
or am I afraid
the exotic act
will make me blunder,
not knowing error
is remedied by practice
as our first home-photographs
headless, half-headed, tilting
extinguished by a flashbulb?
• Robert Lowell

A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.
• William Butler Yeats

To run away from trouble is a form of cowardice and, while it is true that the suicide braves death, he does it not for some noble object but to escape some ill.
• Aristotle

Suicide is an act of ambition that can be committed only when one has passed beyond ambition.
• A. Alvarez

I know a hundred ways to die.
I've often thought I'd try one:
Lie down beneath a motor truck
Some day when standing by one.
Or throw myself from off a bridge—
Except such things must be
so hard upon the scavengers
And men that clean the sea.

I know some poison I could drink.
I've often thought I'd taste it.
But mother bought it for the sink,
And drinking it would waste it.
• Edna St. Vincent Millay

The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
• Dylan Thomas

If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide.
• Mohandas K. Gandhi

Whensoever any affliction assails me, methinks I have the keys of my prison in mine own hand and no remedy presents itself so soon to my heart as mine own sword.
• John Donne

That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
• George Santayana

And must I then, indeed, Pain, live with you
All through my life?—sharing my fire, my bed,
Sharing—oh, worst of all things!—the same head?—
And, when I feed myself, feeding you, too?
• Edna St. Vincent Millay

To run away from trouble is a form of cowardice and, while it is true that the suicide braves death, he does it not for some noble object but to escape some ill.
• Aristotle

My ultimate guardian—namely myself—has not just gone off duty, but, so much more dangerously, has become the advocate, the agent of destruction.
• Joel P. Smith

The Heart asks Pleasure—first—
And then—Excuse from Pain— And then—those little Anodynes
That deaden suffering—
And the—to go to sleep—
And then—if it should be
The will of the Inquisitor
The privilege to die—
• Emily Dickinson

Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold
Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet
Upon thy glimmering thresholds, when the steam
Floats up from those dim fields about the homes
Of happy men that have the power to die,
And grassy barrows of the happier dead.
• Alfred, Lord Tennyson

I tried to commit suicide by sticking my head in the oven, but there was a cake in it.
• Lesley Boone


It will generally be found that where the terrors of life come to outweigh the terrors of death a man will put an end to his life. But the terrors of death offer considerable resistance: they stand like a sentinal at the exit gate.
• Arthur Schopenhauer

Consolation by a possible suicide widens into infinite space this realm where we are suffering....What greater wealth than the suicide each of us bears within himself?
• E. M. Cioran

We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.
• Rilke

As much as the suicidal personality feels able to escape the world by getting rid of the body, reincarnation's revolving door ensures that all hope (of escape) is short lived.
• Joe Fisher

...We are all old-timers,
each of us holds a locked razor.
• Robert Lowell

a reasonable exit
• Stoics

Dip the apple in the brew,
Let the sleeping death seep through.
• Wicked Witch

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."
• F. H. Bradley

The ocean doesn't want me today,
But I'll come back tomorrow to play.
The riptide is waging
And the life guard's away.
But the ocean doesn't want me today.
• Tom Waits

Let them think what they liked, but I didn't mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank, but that's not the same thing.
• Joseph Conrad

There is only one prospect worse than being chained to an intolerable existence: The nightmare of a botched attempt to end it.
• Arthur Koestler

It was easy enough to kill yourself in a fit of despair. It was easy enough to play the martyr. It was harder to do nothing. To endure your life. To wait.
• Erica Jong

...So I concluded that the dead are better off than the living. And most fortunate of all are those who were never born.
• Ecclesiastes

All healthy men having thought of their own suicide...
• Albert Camus

Suicide has never been dealt with except as a social phenomenom...An act like this is prepared within the silence, as is a great work of art. The man himself is ignorant of it. One evening he pulls the trigger or jumps.
• Albert Camus

Suicide...is about life, being in fact the sincerest form of criticism life gets.
• Wilfrid Sheed

Just as I shall select my ship when I am about to go on a voyage, or my house when I propose to take a residence, so shall I choose my death when I am about to depart from life.
• Seneca

...the day you die is better than the day you are born.
• Ecclesiastes

Death is a punishment to some, to others a gift, and to many a favour.
• Seneca

Nine men in ten are would be suicides.
• Benjamin Franklin

It's downhill in too many ways now. I've had enough.
• me

Whereas a prolonged life is not necessarily better, a prolonged death is necessarily worse.
• Seneca

Love dead. Hate living.
• Frankenstein

Every disgruntled person in this world has played with the idea of suicide, self destruction, at some time or other.
• Shariyat-Ki-Sugmad

It is obvious that everyone has no more undeniable right than that to his own personality and life.
• Arthur Schopenhauer

see ya...wouldn't want to be ya
• me

He who does not accept and respect those who want to reject life does not truly accept and respect life itself.
• Thomas Szasz

Some rainy winter Sundays when there's a little boredom, you should always carry a gun. Not to shoot yourself, but to know exactly that you're always making a choice.
• Lina Wertmuller

I believe often that death is good medical treatment because it can achieve what all the medical advances and technology cannot achieve today, and that is stop the suffering of the patient.
• Christiaan Barnard

It is not a thing to do while one is not in one's best mind. Never kill yourself while you are suicidal.
• Edwin Shneidman

Death is my final civil liberty, and I do not choose to surrender it to the state, a church or a physician.
• Frederick Ellis

Never murder a man who is committing suicide.
• Woodrow Wilson

Everything's eventual.
• Stephen King


Every person's fight with death is lost before it begins. What makes the struggle worthwhile, therefore, cannot lie in the outcome. It lies in the dignity with which the fight is waged and the way it finds an end.
• Joseph Fletcher

But for prejudice there would be more; many more; all
• Dostoyevsky's Kirilov

L'animo mio, per disdegnoso gusto credendo col morir fuggir disdegno,ingiusto fece me contra me giusto.
[I was very upset and I believed to avoid the scorn of the other people by dying; so I committed suicide.]
• Dante Alighieri

Why do they always have to come up with a 'reason'?
• Laura Anderson

Consolation by a possible suicide widens into infinite space this realm where we are suffering....What greater wealth than the suicide each of us bears within himself?
• E. M. Cioran

When asked, 'Sibyl, what do you want?' she would reply, 'I want to die.'
• T. S. Eliot

(Suicide is) a suicidal act with a fatal outcome
• WHO

The absolute hopelessness of suicidal depression is, by its nature, contagious, and it renders those who would help impotent to do so.
• Kay Jamison

They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice...that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.
• Arthur Schopenhauer

The thought of suicide is a powerful solace: by means of it one gets through many a bad night.
• Friedrich Nietzsche

Suicide is man's way of telling God, "You can't fire me—I quit."
• Bill Maher

depression's last stop
• George Colt

• No one ever lacks a good reason to suicide.
Cesare Pavese

To run away from trouble is a form of cowardice and, while it is true that the suicide braves death, he does it not for some noble object but to escape some ill.
• Aristotle

It's probably the only way we can give our death a meaning. Because otherwise it's completely arbitrary.
• David Cronbenberg

The great thing about suicide is that it's not one of those things you have to do now or you lose your chance. I mean, you can always do it later.
• Harvey Fierstein

Who is in charge of the clattering train?
The axles creak and the couplings strain;
And the pace is hot, and the points are near,
And Sleep has deadened the driver's ear;
And the signals flash throught the night in vain,
For Death is in charge of the clattering train.
• Anonymous

We can consciously end our life almost anytime we choose. This ability is an endowment, like laughing and blushing, given to no other animal...in any given moment, by not exercising the option of suicide, we are choosing to live.
• Peter McWilliams

Suicide is prepared within the silence of the art, as is a great work of art.
• Albert Camus

Hope is a necessity for normal life and the major weapon against the suicide impulse.
• Karl A. Menninger

Life is impoverished, it loses its interest, when the highest stake in the game of living, life itself, cannot be risked.
• Sigmund Freud

Whenever Richard Cory went downtown,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean-favored, and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good morning," and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich -- yes, richer than a king --
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
• Edwin Arlington Robinson

Nowadays not even a suicide kills himself without desperation. before taking the step he deliberates so long and so carefully that he literally chokes with thought. It is even questionable whether he ought to be called a suicide, since it is really thought which takes his life. He does not die with deliberation, but from deliberation.
• Søren Kierkegaard

I do see that there is an argument against suicide: the grief of the worshipers left behind, the awful famine in their hearts, these are too costly terms for the release.I do see that there is an argument against suicide: the grief of the worshipers left behind, the awful famine in their hearts, these are too costly terms for the release.
• Mark Twain

People who talk a lot about their troubles never commit suicide; talk's the greatest safety-valve there is. I always laugh at that bit in Hamlet where he pretends to despise himself because he unpacks his heart with words, and falls a-scolding like a very drab; that's why the soliloquy about suicide is just Hamlet putting on intellectual airs. A chatterbox like that would never pop himself off with a bare bodkin. No, the suicides are the quiet ones, who can't find the words to fit their misery.
• Robertson Davies

the Gordian knot of pleasure and of pain can only be severed by the stroke that terminates existence.
• Madame De Stael-Holstein

There is no refuge from confession but suicide, and suicide is confession.
• Daniel Webster

If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself, but to put myself back together again. Suicide will be for me only one means of violently re-conquering myself...
• Antoin Artaud

Her wish to die was as pervasive as a dial tone: you lift the receiver, it's always there.
• Joyce Carol Oates

The body is amazingly stubborn when it comes to sacrificing itself to the annihilating directions of the mind.
• Sylvia Plath

The body is a damn hard thing to kill.
• Anne Sexton

Suicide...seems to me to be a flight by which man hopes to recover Paradise Lost instead of trying to deserve Heaven.
• Paul-Louis Landsberg

One does not kill oneself for love of a woman. One kills oneself because love—any love—reveals us in our nakedness, our misery, our vulnerability, our nothingness.
• Cesare Pavese

If wild my breast and sore my pride,
I bask in dreams of suicide,
if cool my heart and high my head
I think, "How lucky are the dead."
• Dorothy Parker


Thou shalt not kill; but needst not strive officiously to keep alive.
• A. H. Clough

Death hath a thousand doors to let out life. I shall find one.
• Sir Thomas Browne

Next week, or next month, or next year I will kill myself. But I might as well last out my month's rent, which has been paid up...
• Jean Rhys

It would be hard to define chaos better than as a world where children decide they don't want to live.
• Edward Hoagland

I wish that I was dead. Oh, they'll be sorry then.
I hate them and I'll kill myself tomorrow.
I want to die. I hate them, hate them. Hate.
• Vernon Scannell

There is a doctrine whispered in secret that a man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door and run away; this is a great mystery which I do not quite understand.
• Socrates

Self-murder, that infernal crime, which all the gods level their thunder at!
• Fane

If I want to die, what am I saving myself for?
• Joanne Greenberg

The ready availability of suicide, like sex and alcohol, is one of life's basic consolations.
• Edward Abbey

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

When we are treated as enemies by destiny we have a right to endeavor to escape its malignity: and yet the regulator which determines the result of this balance is entirely within ourselves: the same sort of life, which reduces one to despair, would fill another with joy, who is placed in a sphere of less elevated hopes.
• Madame De Stael-Holstein

You fellows, in your business, you have a way of handling problems like this. Somebody leaves a pistol in the drawer. I don't have a pistol.
• Richard Nixon, to Al Haig

There are circumstances in which suicide presents a viable option; a workable
alternative; the only sensible solution.
• Edward Abbey

Life is pleasant.
Death is peaceful.
It's the transition that troublesome.
• Isaac Asimov

Suicide is the most sincere form of self-criticism
• unknown

I hate myself, and I want to die.
• Kurt Cobain

It's better to burn out
Than to fade away.
• Neil Young

Most people, in committing a suicidal act, are just as muddled as when they do anything important under emotional stress. Carefully planned acts of suicide are as rare as carefully planned acts of homicide.
• Erwin Stengel

The ocean doesn't want me today,
But I'll come back tomorrow to play.
The riptide is waging
And the life guard's away
But the ocean doesn't want me today.
• Tom Waits

The person who completes suicide dies once. Those left behind die a thousand deaths, trying to relive those terrible moments and understand...
• unknown

But we are all insane anyway...The suicides seem to be the only sane people.
• Mark Twain

Death is in my sight today
Like the recovery of a sick man...
Like the longing of a man to see his house again
After many years of captivity....
• "Dispute Over Suicide"

Suicide is multifaceted. It can be done out of courage or cowardice. It can be an escape or an act of protest. There is no ethical standard by which to judge suicide. It always depends on the individual and the circumstances. I think everyone has the right to make his own choice...
• Nikolai Rafaelovich

Blessed be he who has passed
through this world
In its fateful moments.
• Tiutchev

It'll be by a train, a semi, or a Desert Eagle .357 Magnum.
• me


...a wicked and perfidious act to cast out of one's body the soul which God has committed to it.
• Joesphus Flavius

...Yes, but there are sadder things in life even that that. Short as it is, there is not a man in the world who is happy enough not to wish—not once but again and again—to be dead rather than alive. Troubles come, diseases afflict us, and this makes life, desipte its brevity, seem all to long....
• Artabanus

...it is better not to be born, next best to leave this world as quickly as possible.
• Theognis of Megara

Not to be born is the most to be desired; but having seen the light, the next best is to go whence one came as soon as may be.
• Sophocles

Thou shalt not kill.
• Sixth Commandment

Paete, non dolet.
• Arria

...death afford our souls their liberty and sends them to their own place of purity, where they are to be insesible to all sorts of miseries.
• Eleazar

What shall become of their souls, God alone can tell. His mercy may come...betwixt the bridge and the brook, the knife and the throat.
• Robert Burton

...a French solider ought to show as much courage in facing the adversities and afflictions of life as he shows in facing the fire of a battery. Whoever commits suicide is a coward.
• Napoleon

...the existence of God is the supreme argument against the legitimacy of suicide.
• L'ùon Meynard

...at the bottom, all the reasons leading to suicide can be reduced to one—namely suffering. Disease, failure, misery, death are but some of the expressions, among many others, of the basic evil.
• L'ùon Meynard

Death hath ten thousand several doors.
• John Webster

The many at one moment shun death as the greatest of evils, at another yearn for it as a respite from the evils of life...
• Epicuris

No one kills himself who did not want to kill another or, at least, wish death to another.
• Wilhelm Stekel

...childish form of raction to a childish overestimation of motivations, humiliations, and disappointments. It represents, like neurosis and psychosis, an escape by anti-social means from the injustices of life.
• Alfred Adler

Nobody commits suicide who has not given up hope for love.
• Isidor Sadger

To sum up: remember the door is open. Be not a greater coward than the children, bu do as they do. When things do not please them, they, "I will not play anymore." So when things seem to you to reach that point, just say "I will not play anymore" and so depart, instead of staying to make moan.
• Epicetus

Death is a very sure haven, which should never be feared, and often sought...the more volunatry a death is the more beautiful it is...Life depends on the will of others' death on our own will.
• Seneca

I don't break the law (referring to "Thou Shalt Not Kill") made for crooks, when I take away my own property—thus I am not obliged to conform to the law made for murderers when I deprive myself of my own life.
• Michel de Montaigne

To live by violence is unfair, to die by violence is the fairest of all.
• Seneca


...That a man, from the necessity of his own nature, should endeavor to become non-existent is as impossible as that something should be made out of nothing.
• Spinoza

...We must wait, they say, for the end Nature has decreed. The man who says this does not see that he has blocked his way to freedom. Eternal law has never been more generous than in affording us so many exits to one entry....The situation of humanity is good in that no one is wretched except by his own fault. If you like, live; if you don't like, you can go back where you came from.
• Seneca

La douleur insupportable et une pire mort me semblent les plus excusables incitations.
• Michel de Montaigne

If it is permitted to seek a cure for gout, why not for life?
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "St. Preux"

Prevention of Suicide: There is a justice according to which we take a man's life, but there is none whatsoever when we deprive him of dying: this is only cruelty.
• Friedrich Wilhem Nietzsche

The life of man is of no greater importance to universe than that of an oyster.
• David Hume

Suicide is man's right and privilege.
• Friedrich Wilhem Nietzsche

Prudence and courage should engage us to rid ourselves at once of existence when it becomes a burden.
• David Hume

I guess they call it suicide,
but I'm to full
to swallow my pride
I can't stand losing you
• The Police

...the supreme boon bestowed on man among all the penalties of life.
• Pliny the Elder

You wanna commit suicide...tie your shoes and have some brugiol.
• "Tony Soprano," The Sopranos

Death really only hurts those who are left.
• "Augustus Hill," Oz

It takes far less courage to kill yourself
than it takes to make yourself wake up one more time.
It's harder to stay where you are than to get out.
(For everyone but you, that is.)
• Judith Rossner

If God were suddenly condemned to live the life
which He has inflicted upon men,
He would kill Himself.
• Alexandre Dumas, fils

La mort est secourable et la mort est tranquille.
Ah! contre les douleurs il n'ya a pas d'autre asile.
• Leo Tolstoy

I tried to commit suicide
by sticking my head in the oven,
but there was a cake in it.
• Lesley Boone

As much as the suicidal personality feels able to escape the world by getting rid of the body, reincarnation's revolving door ensures that all hope (of escape) is short lived.
• Joe Fisher

Every disgruntled person in this world has played with the idea of suicide, self destruction, at some time or other.
• Shariyat-Ki-Sugmad

Be grateful for every year you live. No matter how long you live, remember that you will be dead much longer. There is nothing at all to look forward to.
• Ecclesiastes 11:18

It is silliness to live when life is torment; and then we have a prescription to die when death is our physician.
• "Roderigo," Othello

Ye know not the time or the hour.
• Bible

Bsu-f x (Pw x Ew x [Hw x Mw]/Ps x Es x [Hs x Ms]) or Bsu=f(Pw x Ew x sBrw/Ps x Es x Sbrs)
• Calvin J. Frederick/H. L. P. Resnik

You will not find peace by avoiding life.
• Virginia Woolf

The dead drive fast.
• Dracula

No thought is born in me that has not "Death" engraved upon it.
• Michelangelo

Better an end with terror than a terror without end.
• German saying


Chronic anxiety is a state more undesirable than any other, and we will try almost any maneuver to eliminate it.
• Robert E. Neale

When man is seen from the very pit of despair, it may be said that there are only three kinds of people: those who commit suicide, those who attempt it and fail, and those who do not even try. The latter are the living dead.
• Robert E. Neale

Perhaps we are all already on the path, losing our lives and it is only a matter of time.
• Robert E. Neale

The despair of the living dead "is the disconsolateness of not being able to die."
• Søren Kierkegaard

For death rarely seeks out people; we seek out death.
• Robert E. Neale

motivations behind suicide ... death as retaliatory abandonment, as omnipotent mastery, as self-punishment, as a reunion, as a phenomenon that in an emotional sense has already taken place, as retroflexed murder, and as rebirth.
• Herbert Hendin

Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!
• Virginia Woolf

the most fatal of sins because it cannot be repented of
• Thomas Aquinas

We are not responsible for one another's lives or deaths; each man's life and death is his own. But we are responsible to our involvements.
• James Hillman

Death shall be no more, nor mourning, nor crying, nor sorrow.
• Apoc. 21:4

Most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and right place, they're capable of anything.
• Noah Cross, in Chinatown

What they don't know is what we do to them in our heads.
• sniper, in Phone Booth

In my dreams I'm dying all the time ... I never meant to hurt you. I never meant to lie. So this is goodye...this is goodbye ... Tell the truth, you never wanted me. Tell me.
• Moby

Suicide can liberate one from the anxiety of fate and death—as the Stoics knew. But it cannot liberate from the anxiety of guilt and condemnation—as the Christians know.
• Paul Tillich

I believed a person could consider himself a human being as long as he felt totally prepared to kill himself, to interfere in his own biography.
• Varlam Shalamov

The kid in me is suicidal over the fat bastard I've become.
• "Peter Griffin," The Family Guy

Thus we hear that suicide is the most cowardly of acts, that only a madman would commit it, and similar insipidities; or the senseless assertion that suicide is "wrong," though it is obvious there is nothing in the world a man has more incontestable right to than his own life and person.
• Arthur Schopenhauer

The psychoanalytic theories of suicide prove, perhaps, only what was already obvious: that the processes which lead a man to take his own life are at least as complex and difficult as those by which he continues to live. The theories help untangle the intricacy of motive and define the deep ambiguity of the wish to die but say little about what it means to be suicidal, and how it feels.
• A. Alvarez

It is this which makes suicide easier: for the physical pain associated with it loses all significance in the eyes of one afflicted by excessive spiritual suffering.
• Arthur Schopenhauer

Why commit suicide? Pills are a whole lot easier.
• "Johnny Sack," The Sopranos

depression

"Wednesday's child is full of woe." And only six more days to go.

"Reboinoi shel olom, vo bistu? Vi kanstu tzukuken un shveigen? Nein, nein, es iz nishto kein Got!"

The weather of depression is unmodulated, its light a brownout.
William Styron

D-type score = C 1 (MHPG) - C 2 (VMA) + C 3 (NE) - C 4 (NMN + MN)/VMA + C 0
Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, 1989

My soul is deprived of peace.
I have forgotten what happiness is.
I tell myself that my future is lost...
Lamentations

Some struggles are so solitary that they drown in words.
Martha Manning

In depression this faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain in unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come—not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.
William Styron

There is no doubt that as one nears the penultimate depths of depression, the acute sense of loss is connected with a knowledge of life slipping away at accelerated speed.
William Styron

If you compare our knowledge (about depression) to Columbus's discovery of America, America is yet unknown; we are still down on that little island in the Bahamas.
a clinician, to William Styron

Depression isn't caused by some mythical biochemical imbalance. It's another word for hopelessness.
Peter Breggin

In depression this faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come....If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.
William Styron

The world goes by my cage and never sees me.
Randall Jerrell

"Mental illness" is a metaphor. Minds can be "sick" only in the sense that jokes are "sick" or economies are "sick."
Thomas Szasz

Nothing that grieves us can be called little; by the eternal laws of proportion a child's loss of a doll and a king's loss of a crown are events of the same size.
Mark Twain

For the thing which
I greatly feared is come upon me,
and that which I was afraid of
Is come unto me.
I was not in safety, neither
had I rest, neither was I quiet;
yet trouble came.
Job

O, yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill,
To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson

But it is always a question whether I wish to avoid these glooms....These 9 weeks give one a plunge into deep waters....One goes down into the well & nothing protects one from the assault of truth.
Virginia Woolf

One feels inclined to doubt sometimes whether the dragons of primeval days are really extinct.
Sigmund Freud

Labour must be the cure, not sympathy—Labour is the only radical cure for rooted sorrow.
Charlotte Brontë

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success.
John Steinbeck

I was taught to feel, perhaps too much
The self-sufficing power of solitude.
William Wordsworth

One can only see what one observes, and one observes only things which are already in the mind.
Alphonse Bertillon

...To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
William Wordsworth

Everything is meaningless, says the teacher, utterly meaningless! What do people get for their hard work? Generations come and go, but nothing really changes...
Ecclesiastes

Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury.
Signifying nothing.
William Shakespeare

To increase knowledge only increases sorrow.
Ecclesiastes

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway

The happy ending is justly scorned as a misrepresentation; for the world, as we know it...yields but one ending: death, disintegration, dismemberment, and the crucifixition of our heart with the passing of the forms that we have loved.
Joseph Campbell

To whom can I speak today?
[One's] fellows are evil;
The friends of today do not love...
Hearts are rapacious:
Every man siezed his fellow's good...
The gentle man has perished,
[But] the violent man has access to everybody...
Their are no righteous;
The land is left to those who do wrong...
To whom can I speak today? I am laden with wretchedness
For lack of intimate friends....
The Dialogue of a Misanthrope with His Own Soul

a living death
?

In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

The privacy of the mind is an impermeable barrier.
Kay Jamison

When the low heavy sky weighs like a lid
Upon the spirit aching for the light
And all the wide horizon's line is hid
By a black day sadder than any night

And hearses without drum or instrument,
File slowly through my soul; crushed, sorrowful,
Weeps Hope, and Grief, fierce and omnipotent,
Plants his black banner on my drooping skull.
John Wolfgang von Goethe

I will endeavour not not to repay you in notes of sorrow and despondence, though all my sprightly chords seem broken.
William Cowper

The flower that smiles today
Tomorrow dies;
All that we wish to stay,
Tempts and then flies.

Whilst yet the calm hours creep,
Dream thou—and from thy sleep
Then wake to weep.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

It wearies me, you say it wearies you;
But how I caught it, found it, or came by it
What stuff 'tis made of, whereof it is born
I am to learn;
And such a want-wit sadness makes of me,
That I have much ado to know myself.
Merchant of Venice's Antonio

All dis-ease is not disease.
Viktor E. Frankl


The night
was late and soggy: It was
New York in July.
I was in my room, hiding,
hating the need to swallow.
Elizabeth Prince

I have felt the wind of the wing of madness.
Baudelaire

Learn the darkness.
Gather round you all
the things that you love, name
their names, prepare
to lose them. It will be
as if all you know were turned
around within your body.
Wendell Berry

I measure every gried I meet
with analytic eyes;
I wonder if it weighs like mine,
Or has an easier size.
I wonder if they bore it long,
Or did it just begin?
I could not tell the date of mine,
It feels so old a pain.

I wonder if it hurts to live,
And if they have to try,
And whether could they choose between,
They would not rather die.
Emily Dickinson

It (depression) is a positive and active anguish, a sort of psychical neuralgia wholly unknown to normal life.
William James

...Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us. Rainer Maria Rilke

Sometimes a call to spiritual solitude and liberty may come to us masked as a humiliating sickness or weakness.
Thomas Merton

When depression is stigmatized as illness and weakness, a double bind is created: If we admit to depression, we will be stigmatized by others; if we feel it but do not admit it, we stigmatize ourselves, internalizing the social judgment. The only remaining choice may be truly sick behavior: to experience no emotion at all.
Lesley Hazelton

Life is a banquent, and most poor suckers are starving to death.
Rosalind Russell

Depression is rage spread thin.
George Santayana

If depression is creeping up and must be faced, learn something about the nature of the beast: You may escape without a mauling.
R. W. Shepherd

If we admit our depression openly and freely, those around us get from it an experience of freedom rather than the depression itself.
Rollo May

Suffering, once accepted, loses its edge, for the terror of it lessens, and what remains is generally far more manageable than we had imagined.
Lesley Hazelton

Age is the bilge we cannot shake from the mop.
Robert Lowell

You handle depression in much the same way you handle a tiger.
R. W. Shepherd

The Bluebird of Happiness long absent from his life, Ned is visited by the Chicken of Depression. Gary Larson

...And I'm alive.
And I'm alone.
And I never wanted to be either of those.
Chemical Brothers

Death is not the greatest loss in life.
The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.
Norman Cousins

So few my roads,
So many the mistakes.
Esenin

Our present is all void and dreariness,
If consecration come not from without.
Hugo von Hofmannsthal

It is one of the saddest rules of life that painful things that cannot be changed must be endured.
John T. Maltsberger

If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Examination of the temporal factor in depression reveals that, in its preinternalized form, the hostility is clearly Oedipal in nature, being direted as it is toward the inexorable marching of Father Time.
Christopher Scribner

hostility turned inward
Sigmund Freud

He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.
Aeschylus

To whom should I speak today?
I am heavy-laden with misery
& without a comforter.
Anonymous

Pain or suffering of any kind, if long continued, causes depression and lessens the power of action; yet it is well adapted to make a creature guard itself against any great or sudden evil.
Charles Darwin

sickness unto death
Søren Kierkegaard


human perplexity and helplessness in the face of nature's dreaded forces
Sigmund Freud

I drink not from mere joy in wine nor to scoff at faith—no, only to forget myself for a moment, that only do I want of intoxication, that alone.
Omar Khayyam

Great is my sorrow, without limits. None knows of it, except God in Heaven, and He cannot have pity.
Søren Kierkegaard

... people who are afraid of living are also especially frightened of death.
Médard Boss

great necessities of fate, against which there is no remedy
Sigmund Freud

painful riddle of death
Sigmund Freud

the great cause of much psychological illness is the fear of knowledge of oneself—of one's emotions, impulses, memories, capacities, potentialities, of one's destiny.
Sigmund Freud

...the human animal is characterized by two great fears that other animals are protected from: the fear of life and the fear of death.
Ernest Becker

For life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost.
José Ortega y Gasset

Our fear of death is really our fear of life.
Robert E. Neale

In the midst of life we are in death.
?

Death is a truth made profound by the size of our wonder.
?

We have nothing to fear but fear itself.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

Most people die at thirty and are buried at sixty.
Shaw

The despair of the living dead "is the disconsolateness of not being able to die."
Søren Kierkegaard

I'm living a life I don't wish to live.
Virginia Woolf

Man, when he does not grieve, almost ceases to exist.
?

Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.
Virginia Woolf

But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking?—the entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world—a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors.
Virginia Woolf

Nothing exaggerates the torture of childhood. People say children are happy. They forget the terrible revelations...the sudden shadows on the ceilings.
Virginia Woolf

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages
Virginia Woolf

The promise that on the other side of depression liesa beautiful life, one worth surviving suicide for, will have turned out wrong. It will all be a big dupe.
Elizabeth Wurtzel

Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.
Virginia Woolf

Very early in my life it was too late.
Marguerite Duras

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway

How can you hide from what never goes away?
Heraclitus

I myself am hell.
Robert Lowell


Love hurts.
Nazareth

I would say that learning to know anxiety is an adventure which every man has to affront if he would not go to perdition either by not having know anxiety or by sinking under it. He therefore who has learned rightly to be anxious has learned the most important thing.
Søren Kierkegaard

Don't nobody know my troubles with God.
Moby

I cannot do anything new. I cannot see anything new!
Ecclesiastes

Pain is a climate like winter. It closes over you and soon you can't imagine not living in it.
Helen Dunmore

For it is not death or hardship that is a fearful thing, but the fear of death and hardship.
Epictetus

Hope...It is the quintessential delusion.
"Architect," Matrix Reloaded

All human life can be interpreted as a continuous attempt to avoid despair.
Paul Tillich

Sweet is't to sleep, sweeter to be a stone.
In this dread age of terror and of shame,
Thrice blest is he who neither sees nor feels.
Leave me then here, and trouble not my rest.
Michelangelo

When thou dost feel creeping time at they gate, these fooleries will please thee less: I am past my relish for such matters.
Queen Elizabeth I

Sometimes I wish a cat would eat me.
"Milhouse," The Simpsons

Parting is a foretaste of death.
Arthur Schopenhauer

The Averted
The one whose eyes
do not meet yours
is alone at heart
and looks where the dead look
for an ally in his cause.
Les Murray

He who is without hope is also without fear: this is the meaning of the expresion "desperate." If ... he is even brought to the point of believing that what he does not desire to happen must happen and what he desires to happen can never happen simply becase he desires it, then this is the condition called despair.
Arthur Schopenhauer

What am I?

Bsu-f x (Pw x Ew x [Hw x Mw]/Ps x Es x [Hs x Ms]) or Bsu=f(Pw x Ew x sBrw/Ps x Es x Sbrs)
sua manu cadere
Todestrieb
Selbsttötung
sibi morten consciscere
Lebensmüder
Selbstmord/Selbstmörder
Selbstvernichtung
zelfmoord/zelfmoordenaar
самоубийство, суицид, самоубийца, провал планов, крах надежд по собственной вине
självmord
试图自杀者, 自杀性行为, 自毁
‏(الاسم) انتحار (فعل) ينتحر‏
‮התאבדות, מתאבד, מעשה או מסלול של הרס עצמי‬
willkürliche Entleibung
kamikaze
αυτοκτονία, αυτοχειρία, αυτόχειρας v. αυτοκτονώ
Freitod
catching the bus
homicide de soi-même
vim sibi inferre
mort volotaire
自殺, 自殺行為, 自殺者, 自殺的行為
試圖自殺者, 自殺性行為, 自毀
ontic self-negation
most sincere form of self criticism
a reasonable exit
Hemingway solution
policeman's farewell
the most fatal of sins because it cannot be repented of
a reasonable exit
depression's last stop
man's right and privilege
a suicidal act with a fatal outcome
hara-kiri
Suizid

So? What am I?



You're right!

before/after and panoramic views of Gulf Coast hurricane damage

Amazing the damage Hurricane Katrina did to the Gulf Coast. In 10 years, I'll bet, the Mississippi coast (especially Biloxi and Gulfport with all their casinos) will be barely recognizable to those of us who were familiar it before Katrina. Giant condominiums are already going up all over.

Panoramic views of the coast from the Washington Post:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/panorama/2005/10/14/PA2005101400660.html

and before and after Flash animations from the Sun Herald, south Mississippi's newspaper:

http://www.sunherald.com/mld/sunherald/news/special_packages/renewal/before_after/

a sobering pet "Did You Know?"

That according to the HSUS (Humane Society of the United States):

• Average number of litters a fertile cat can produce in one year: 3
• Average number of kittens in a feline litter: 4–6
• In seven years, one female cat and her offspring can theoretically produce 420,000 cats.
• Only one out of 12 cats born ever find a permanent home.
• There are 45 cats and dogs for every one person born.
• 450 cats and dogs are destroyed each HOUR in the U.S., because there are not enough homes for them!

and more...

• Number of cats and dogs entering shelters each year: 6-8 million (HSUS estimate)
• Number of cats and dogs euthanized by shelters each year: 3-4 million (HSUS estimate)
• Number of cats and dogs adopted from shelters each year: 3-4 million (HSUS estimate)
• Number of cats and dogs reclaimed by owners from shelters each year:
• Between 600,000 and 750,000: 0% of dogs and 2-5% of cats entering shelters (HSUS estimate)
• Number of animal shelters in the United States: Between 4,000 and 6,000 (HSUS estimate)
• Percentage of dogs in shelters who are purebred: 25% (HSUS estimate)
• Average number of litters a fertile cat can produce in one year: 3
• Average number of kittens in a feline litter: 4-6
• In seven years, one female cat and her offspring can theoretically produce 420,000 cats.
• Average number of litters a fertile dog can produce in one year: 2
• Average number of puppies in a canine litter: 6-10
• In six years, one female dog and her offspring can theoretically produce 67,000 dogs.

volunteering

I'm hoping to do some volunteer work around the Boston area. So far I'm going to start up with:

PawSafe
http://www.pawsafe.org

PawSafe Animal Rescue is a no-kill, non-profit animal rescue. Our main goal is to place orphaned and unwanted dogs into loving permanent homes.

PawSafe operates both locally and out of state. Local dogs are our first priority although most of the animals in our care come from over-crowded shelters in states with extreme over population and high kill rates.


Ellen Gifford Sheltering Home
http://members.petfinder.org/~MA44/index.htm
30 Undine Road | Brighton, MA 02135
617.787.8872

The Ellen M. Gifford Shelter is a cageless, no-kill shelter which has existed in Brighton since 1884. Originally a shelter for all animals, it became a shelter strictly for cats in the 1950s.

Our cats are not kept in cages and we keep the shelter as much like a home as possible. Many of our cats are lovely adults who would have been euthanized if they hadn't come here. If you can help out with chores, projects or fostering or donations we'd love to hear from you!


SPIN (Stray Pets in Need)
http://www.straypetsinneed.info/
Stray Pets in Need | PO Box #812143 | Wellesley, MA 02482-0014
781.235.1218

Our mission is to promote the well-being of animals and responsible human-animal relationships.

Stray Pets in Need of MA, Inc. was formed in 1991 to promote the well-being of animals and responsible human/animal relationships. 2006 marked our fifteenth year anniversary working in ten Metrowest communities. Each year over 400 animals are placed in new, carefully selected adoptive homes.

that "everyone I know goes away in the end"...

...is true.

"hurt"

i hurt myself today
to see if i still feel
i focus on the pain
the only thing that's real
the needle tears a hole
the old familiar sting
try to kill it all away
but i remember everything
what have i become?
my sweetest friend
everyone i know
goes away in the end
and you could have it all
my empire of dirt

i will let you down
i will make you hurt

i wear this crown of thorns
upon my liar's chair
full of broken thoughts
i cannot repair
beneath the stains of time
the feelings disappear
you are someone else
i am still right here

what have i become?
my sweetest friend
everyone i know
goes away in the end
and you could have it all
my empire of dirt

i will let you down
i will make you hurt

if I could start again
a million miles away
i would keep myself
i would find a way

• trent reznor

biggest disappointments so far

I haven't experienced too many big disappointments in my life. Four of the biggest ones so far, though (and I know, relatively speaking, that none of them is earth shattering, in the grand scheme of things) have been:

1. my MCAT scores in 1987

I studied for the MCAT for months, not cramming and not just learning fleeting facts that I'd forget soon after. I learned so much about biology, chemistry, and physics, including learning how they all worked together. I took a handful of timed practice tests, in the very room where the actual test was to be held, and always scored high.

The day of the test I thought the real MCAT was much easier than the practice ones. I wasn't nervous and thought I'd done really well. I couldn't wait to get the results, which seemed to take forever to arrive. And then they did, much to my dismay: a 49! I was stunned into tears, and knew that I would have a hard time getting into medical school, despite all the other things going for me. I'm lucky that the state school was a good one and that their "mission" was to accept in-state students.

2. not making the snare drum line of the Tulach Ard Pipe Band in 2001

After the Worcester Kiltie Pipe Band folded, and the drum corps decided to integrate with Tulach Ard, I worked hard in the off season and thought I had a great chance of making the corps. But I had some bad technical habits the lead drummer didn't feel comfortable with and then had an abyssmal audition. I knew I was done for. It took me a few years, no exaggeration, to get past this.

3. quitting medical school the day after I started

I worked for a couple of years to prepare for and then go to medical school. I went to school year 'round, in order to finish my music performance/pedagogy major and to also take all the medical-school prerequisites (I graduated with over 200 credit hours). I got into the University of Mississippi medical school, moved to Jackson, Mississippi, and began school.

The first morning of school I woke up in a panic, crying nearly uncontrollably. I managed to get to orientation but still felt overwhelmingly anxious (more to follow...tired of typing here).

4. terrible audition for trumpet-section chair placement in 9th grade

At Fernwood Junior High, we had concert-band auditions for section seating (1st trumpet, 1st chair, etc., for example). I'd never had to audition before and so was terrifically nervous. I knew I was good enough to do very well, but I didn't...I ended up way down in the 3d-trumpet section. I went home and bawled in disappointment.

In hindsight, what still peeves me about the above is that the band director, instead of auditioning us separately, in private, had us all sit in a line and play scales in front of him and every other single auditioning trumpet player. Ridiculous.