Stripped of incidental ornaments, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are seen as the same dream dreamed twice over, the second time a...s nightmare; though, to be sure, the terror of the second dream is already at work in the first, whose euphoria persists strangely into the second. In both books, there is a pretended, a quasi-ritual death to the community and its moral codes; though in Tom Sawyer that death is a "lark" undertaken in childish pique, while in Huckleberry Finn it is a last desperate evasion, an act of self-defense. In both, there is a consequent spying on the community from cover to watch the effects of that death, the aftermath of regret: the childish dream of the suicide, who longs to be present at his own discovery, come true. In the one case, however, the spying is a prelude to a triumphant return, a revelation, in the other, to a further flight and concealment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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 reconquering myself, of brutally invading my being, of anticipating the unpredictable approaches of God. By suicide, I reintroduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts t...o answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest--whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories--comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this ...double impossibility.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Each victim of suicide gives his act a personal stamp which expresses his temperament, the special conditions in which he is invol...ved, and which, consequently, cannot be explained by the social and general causes of the phenomenon.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The woman poet must be either a ... sexless, reclusive eccentric, with nothing to say specifically to women, or a brilliant, tragi...c, tortured suicide.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To choose a hardship for ourselves is our only defence against that hardship. This is what is meant by accepting suffering.... Tho...se who, by their very nature, can suffer completely, utterly, have an advantage. That is how we can disarm the power of suffering, make it our own creation, our own choice; submit to it. A justification for suicide.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »