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