For scientists to minimize the complexity of the chemical interactions within the brain or at the synapses would be a damning mistake, a late-twentieth-century equivalent of earlier, primitive views that deranged minds were caused by satanic spells or an excess of vapors.

— Kay Redfield Jamison, Night Falls Fast

Members of families in which there has been a suicide are far more likely than others to kill themselves. This is in part simply because family suicides make the unthinkable thinkable. It is also because the pain of living when someone you love has annihilated himself can be almost intolerable. A mother whose son had hanged himself said to me, “I feel as though my fingers are being caught in a slamming door and I’ve stopped permanently in midscream.” It is also because, at a presumably genetic level, suicide runs in families.

— Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon

Any single suicide is the result of psychopathology, but the relatively consistent appearance of psychopathological suicidality seems to be tied to social constructs. In each society there is a different context for the act, but it may be the case that a certain percentage of the population in every society kill themselves. The values and customs of a society determine which causes will lead to the act in which place. People who believe that they are operating on the basis of unique trauma are often, in fact, simply manifesting a tendency in their society that drives people to death.

— Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon

Some people with every bright promise in their life commit suicide. Suicide is not the culmination of a difficult life; it comes in from some hidden location beyond the mind and beyond consciousness. I can look back now at my own little para-suicidal period: the logic that seemed so abundantly reasonable to me at that time now seems as alien as the bacteria that gave me pneumonia a few years earlier. It is like a powerful germ that entered the body and took over. I had been hijacked by strangeness.

— Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon

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

— George Santayana
Quoted by Andrew Solomon in
The Noonday Demon

The United States is the only country in the world where the primary means of suicide is guns. More Americans kill themselves with guns than are murdered with them every year in the United States. The ten states with the weakest gun-control laws have a suicide rate twice that of the ten states with the strongest laws.

— Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon

A suicide’s excuses are mostly by the way. At best they assuage the guilt of the survivors, soothe the tidy-minded, and encourage the sociologists in their endless search for convincing categories and theories. They are like a trivial border incident which triggers a major war. The real motives which impel a man to take his own life are elsewhere; they belong to the internal world, devious, contradictory, labyrinthine, and mostly out of sight.

— A. Alvarez, The Savage God

It is possible to understand the paths that have led someone toward suicide, but the mentality of that actual moment, of the leap required to take the final action — that is incomprehensible and terrifying and so strange that it makes one feel as though one had never really known the person who did it.

— Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon

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, A Short History of Decay

Once he told us at supper, “This afternoon I met the Lord over by the river, and we fell to talking, you know, and He made a suggestion I thought was interesting. He said, ‘John, why don’t you just go home and be old?’ But I had to tell him I wasn’t sure I was up to the travelling.”

“Papa,” my mother said, “you are home. He probably just meant you should ease up on yourself a little.”

“Well,” the old man said, “well . . . ,” and sank back into his radiance, thinking whatever it was he thought.

— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

This morning the world by moonlight seemed to be an immemorial acquaintance I had always meant to befriend. If there was ever a chance, it has passed. Strange to say, I feel a little that way about myself.

— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters. There are so many things you would never think to tell anyone. And I believe they may be the ones that mean most to you, and that even your own child would have to know in order to know you well at all.

— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

Our dream of life will end as dreams do end, abruptly and completely, when the sun rises, when the light comes. And we will think, All that fear and all that grief were about nothing. But that cannot be true. I cannot believe we will forget our sorrows altogether. That would be forgetting that we lived, humanly speaking. Sorrow seems to me to be a great part of the substance of human life. For example, at this very moment I feel a kind of loving grief for you as you read this, because I do not know you, and because you have grown up fatherless, you poor child, lying on your belly now in the sun with Soapy asleep on the small of your back. You are drawing those terrible little pictures that you will bring me to admire, and which I will admire because I have not the heart to say one word that you might remember against me.

— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

I have thought I might have a book ready at hand to clutch if I began to experience unusual pain, so that it would have an especial recommendation from being found in my hands. That seemed theatrical, on consideration, and it might have the perverse effect of burdening the book with unpleasant associations. The ones I considered, by the way, were Donne and Herbert and Barth’s Epistle to the Romans and Volume II of Calvin’s Institutes. Which is by no means to slight Volume I.

— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

It all means more than I can tell you. So you must not judge what I know by what I find words for.

— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead