Quote detectives, polish your magnifying glasses

March 29, 2022 12:01 PM

I'm trying to remember a quote about suicide, but I can only remember the gist, not the phrasing or the source.

The gist was this: a person can be "a suicide" even if they don't end up killing themselves. The Suicide is a living character type, according to my impression of the quote, not just a forensic description.

Does this ring any bells? I knew the source 15 years ago but can't place it now. My soft suspicion is David Foster Wallace, but googling him + "suicide" obviously leads in the wrong direction.

posted by Beardman to Media & Arts (4 answers total)

Goodreads has 2,092 quotes from David Foster Wallace. The first quote on that page sort-of fits your description, though not really. I didn't read any quotes beyond the first page.
posted by alex1965 at 12:19 PM on March 29, 2022

For a long time I had a quote of similar subject matter floating around in my head, and it turned out to be from a Morrissey interview (published in Morrissey in Conversation: The Essential Interviews):

"Once again, because I had such an intense view about taking one's life, I imagined that this must be my calling, suicide, nothing more spectacular or interesting. I felt that people who eventually took their own lives were not only aware that they would do so in the last hours or weeks or months of their life. They had always been aware of it. They had resigned themselves to suicide many years before they actually did it. In a sense I had, yes."
posted by jabes at 1:56 PM on March 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

Best answer: There's a quote from This Is Water by Wallace that sounds similar:

Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.” This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

There's also this from Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse:

And here it must be said that to call suicides only those who actually destroy themselves is false. Among these, indeed, there are many who in a sense are suicides only by accident and in whose being suicide has no necessary place. Among the common run of men there are many of little personality and stamped with no deep impress of fate, who find their end in suicide without belonging on that account to the type of the suicide by inclination; while, on the other hand, of those who are to be counted as suicides by the very nature of their beings are many, perhaps a majority, who never in fact lay hands upon themselves. […] But just as there are those who at the least indisposition develop a fever, so do those whom we call suicides, and who are always very emotional and sensitive, develop at the least shock the notion of suicide. […] All suicides are familiar with the struggle against the temptation of suicide. Every one of them knows very well in some corner of his soul that suicide, though a way out, is rather a mean and shabby one, and that it is nobler and finer to be felled by life than by one’s own hand.

posted by rollick at 12:42 AM on March 30, 2022

Response by poster: Rollick – thank you, it was from Steppenwolf.
posted by Beardman at 5:50 PM on March 30, 2022