Rachel's Site for Recovery from Self Harm and Eating Disorders

I always was a bit of a quote freak, collecting quotes that I saw as relevant to me, or just funny. The people who wrote them were always put it better than me, they managed to explain how I felt in the words that I could not find. Since I couldn’t think of a better ‘q‘ I decided that this would do. These are some of the best quotes that I have, quotes that I didn’t fit in the top of each chapter.

’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 into nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will.’

Antonin Artaud

‘It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.’

E.M. Goran

‘I am in that temper that if I were underwater I would scarcely kick to come to the top’

John Keats

‘Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination with suicide if he hadn’t an audience, and lines to speak?’

Jean Genet

‘’Here take back the stuff that I am, nature, knead it back into the dough of being, make of me a bush, a cloud, whatever you will, even a man, only no longer make me.’

G.C Lichtenberg

‘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

‘Nowadays not even a suicide kills himself in 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

‘When a person can no longer laugh at himself it is time for others to laugh at him.’

Thomas Szasz

‘Men often treat others worse than themselves, but they rarely treat anyone better. It is the height of folly to expect consideration and decency from a person who mistreats himself.’

Thomas Szasz

‘If you talk to God you are praying; if God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.’

Thomas Szasz

‘When a man says that he is Jesus or Napoleon, or that the Martians are after him or claims something else that seems outrageous to common sense, he is labelled psychotic and locked up in a madhouse. Freedom of speech is only for normal people.’

Thomas Szasz

‘Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly often attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.’

Thomas Szasz

‘Narcissist: psychoanalytic term for the person who loves himself more than his analyst; considered to be the manifestation of a dire mental disease whose successful treatment depends on the patient learning to love the analyst more and himself less.’

Thomas Szasz

‘There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.’

E.M. Goran

‘The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.’

Walter Benjamin

‘There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in is head, frightened people, and for whom delirium has the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.’

Antonin Artaud

‘You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a common sense attitude; that you could take it for granted that I was deluded.’

Ludwig Wittgenstein

‘Gluttony is an emotional escape, a sign that something is eating us.’

Peter De Vries

‘One should eat to live, not live to eat’

Molière

‘Food=joy...guilt...anger....pain...nurturing...friendship...hatred...the way you look and feel...food=everything you can imagine.’

Susan Powter

‘We have lost the art of living; and in the most important science of all, the science of daily life, the science of behaviour, we are complete ignoramuses. We have psychology instead.’

D. H. Lawrence

How many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb?

One, and four to decide if it really wants to change.