We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye . . .

— Paul, 1 Corinthians 15:51

. . . I would advise you against defensiveness on principle. It precludes the best eventualities along with the worst. At the most basic level, it expresses a lack of faith. As I have said, the worst eventualities can have great value as experience. And often enough, when we think we are protecting ourselves, we are struggling against our rescuer.

— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

I’d never have believed I’d see a wife of mine doting on a child of mine. It still amazes me every time I think of it. I’m writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you’ve done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God’s grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle. You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you.

— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

The fraudulence paradox was that the more time and effort you put into trying to appear impressive or attractive to other people, the less impressive or attractive you felt inside — you were a fraud. And the more of a fraud you felt like, the harder you tried to convey an impressive or likable image of yourself so that other people wouldn’t find out what a hollow, fraudulent person you really were. Logically, you would think that the moment a supposedly intelligent nineteen-year-old became aware of this paradox, he’d stop being a fraud and just settle for being himself (whatever that was) because he’d figured out that being a fraud was a vicious infinite regress that ultimately resulted in being frightened, lonely, alienated, etc. But here was the other, higher-order paradox, which didn’t even have a form or name — I didn’t, I couldn’t.

— David Foster Wallace, “Good Old Neon”

What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.

— David Foster Wallace, “Good Old Neon”

The deep darkness vanished into ordinary daylight, and the mystery of God was only made more splendid. So my dear hoard of silence can be scattered, too, and the great silence will not be any poorer for it.

— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

He felt in a dumb, bitter and uncomprehending way like a man who has destroyed his home without having prepared another.

— Graham Greene, Brighton Rock

Dallow watched in silence and the Boy felt more anger against his friend than against his enemy.

— Graham Greene, Brighton Rock

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