"Suicide" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fatality to suffer those very afflictions we dread the most. We are told of persons who trembled for a lifetime at the horrid anticipation of being one day mad; it was the shadow of the judgement that was creeping on them, which cast them finally amongst the victims of the lunatic asylum. The suicide is the prophet of his own doom; the presentiment of death by drowning has but too often ended in a watery grave. Perhaps where the fibres of the heart are weakest, the strain brought on them by excited fancy snaps them in the misfortune ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... No evil shall come upon you."[1] His comrades however prevented him from giving himself up, and called on him to play a braver part and die with them, each by his own hand. He put them off by talking philosophically, as he has it, about the sin of suicide, a euphemism for a collection of commonplaces on the duty of preserving their lives. But when this enraged them, he bethought him of another device, and proposed that they should cast lots to kill each other. They ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... nearer approach. But the scouts were obstinate and remained as motionless as statues. The tramping of myriad feet came nearer and nearer, until the sound partook of one general, thunderous undertone of the most trying character to the lad. It seemed to him so much like suicide—this waiting for a terrible danger as it steadily approached—that he was strongly tempted to start his horse ...
— Through Apache Lands • R. H. Jayne
... Octavia, daughter of Claudius, and because she declined his suit ordered her death; these and many other similar crimes brought on inevitable rebellion; Spain and Gaul declared in favour of Galba; the Praetorian Guards followed suit; Nero fled from Rome, and sought refuge in suicide (37-68). ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... supposed that he was goin' deranged, poor fellow, and at last he suddenly disappeared, no one could tell why; but it's clear enough now, for he was made to put the accounts all wrong, and I suppose the struggle in his mind drove him to suicide, for he was a long, thin, weakly sort of man, without much brains except ...
— Philosopher Jack • R.M. Ballantyne
... been the same since her husband died, Doctor. She was often very strange in her manner. Between ourselves, I strongly suspect it to be a case of deliberate suicide. She was utterly broken ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... out His Shepherd's Hands with which alone He could gather His sheep to His Breast, and the Feet that alone could bear Him into the wilderness to seek after that which was lost. Was there ever a Suicide such as this, such a despair of high hopes, such a ruin of all ambition, a dying so complete and irremediable as the ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson
... anything: on the contrary, all of them, a numerous and distinguished band, met an untimely end. Augustus arrested them and placed them in various cities: they took this very much amiss and committed suicide. The tribes then were quiet for a time, but later they amply requited the Romans for the calamity.—Besides doing this Augustus granted money to the soldiers, not as to victors, though he himself ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. 4 • Cassius Dio
... the advocates of the "last ditch" theory, who have sworn never to live in the United States, will, doubtless, depart to foreign lands, or follow the example of the Virginia gentleman who committed suicide on ascertaining the hopelessness of the Rebellion. Failing to do either of these things, they must finally acquiesce in the supremacy of ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox
... of the letter at the beginning of the sleep walking described by the lady in waiting seems as if Lady Macbeth had a secret, a confession to make—in the name of the poet. I think also at the end, when the everlasting brooding over her deed drives her to suicide, she dies as a substitute for her intellectual creator, for ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... nature, which is about to lose the essence of human intercourse, it did not take an ignoble form. He did not suppose that confession would bring him happiness. It was rather that he yearned to get clear of the tangle. So does the suicide yearn. The impulses are akin, and the crime of suicide lies rather in its disregard for the feelings of those whom we leave behind. Confession need harm no one—it can satisfy that test—and though it was un-English, ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... rapid transition from cases of this kind to suicide, but, amongst the many reasons, moral and religious, which may be urged against suicide, there is one which connects itself closely with the considerations which have just been under our notice. As ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... me, my tight fellow,' continued Sir Terence, holding Mordicai fast, 'when, in the name of all the saints, good or bad, in the calendar, do you reckon to let us sport the SUICIDE?' ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... the countenance of every passer-by, to recognize Attwood. "ADIEU A DEMAIN!"—there was a dreadful meaning in the words, which the writer of them little knew. "Adieu a demain!"—the morrow was come, and the soul of the poor suicide was now in the presence of God. I dare not think of his fate; for, except in the fact of his poverty and desperation, was he worse than any of us, his companions, who had shared his debauches, and marched with him up to the very brink of ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... younger of two sisters, breaks one girl's engagement, drives one man to suicide, causes the murder of another, leads another to lose his fortune, and in the end marries a stupid and unpromising suitor, leaving the really worthy one to marry ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... soon begun to feel his inactivity weigh upon him, and at the same time he had become impatient at the narrowness of his means. He had ventured upon hazardous speculations. He had lost every thing he had; and even his honor was at stake. In his despair he was thinking of suicide, when chance brought to his house a former comrade, Count Claudieuse. In a moment of confidence, the marquis confessed every thing; and the other had promised to rescue him, and save him from disgrace. That was noble ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... his senses enough to think connectedly, and he tried to remember whether he had ever heard of a situation like his own. As he was neither a novelist nor a critic, he failed, and frankly asked himself whether suicide might not be a way out of the difficulty for Sabina. He was not an unbeliever, and he had always abhorred and despised the idea of suicide, as most thoroughly healthy men do when it occurs to them; but if at that time he could have persuaded himself that his death could undo the ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... and a rancor which we cannot understand. Poverty was elevated into a noble virtue and a transcendent merit.[442] This was the height of ascetic absurdity, since poverty is only want, and the next step would be a cult of suicide. The mendicant orders fought each other malignantly. Every difference of opinion made a war of extermination. Civil contests were carried on with extravagant ferocity as to the means used and as to the exultation of success or the penalty of failure. ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... you, man, that no one knows that path except—except—Retief, and, supposing Horrocks has discovered it, if he attempts to cross, there can only be one result to his mad folly. I tell you what it is, the man should be stopped. It's absolute suicide—nothing more nor less." ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... me like a sort of a congregational suicide, Mr. Clewe," said she. "And it can't even be said that all the members are doin' it of their own accord, for I am not. If Sammy did not go, I would not, but if he does, I do, and there's the end of that; and I suppose it won't be very much longer before there's the end of all of ...
— The Great Stone of Sardis • Frank R. Stockton
... all perish through sheer inanity, or die desperately by suicide if no mystery remained in the world. Mystery takes a thousand beautiful shapes; it lurks even in the handiwork of man, in a stone god, or in some mighty, intricate machine, incomprehensibly deliberate and determined. The imagination endows the man-made thing with consciousness ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... shades, sweet melancholy driving before it joy and being routed itself, until the annunciation of the first theme and the dying away of the dance, dancers and the solid globe itself, as if earth had committed suicide for loss of the sun. The last two bars could have been written only by Chopin. They are ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... a vain attempt to obtain an appointment as a surgeon's mate to Africa, he made up his mind to suicide. A guinea had been sent him by a gentleman, which he declined. Mrs Angel, his landlady, knowing him to be in want, the day before his death offered him his dinner, but this also he spurned; and, on the 25th of August 1770, having first destroyed all his papers, ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... the same, Nov. 7.-Murder of Maria Antoinette. Loss of Lord Montagu and Mr. Burdett in the falls of Schaflhausen. Suicide of Mr. Tickell. "Death an endless sleep." Mr. Lysons' Roman Remains. Account of ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... blackmailing, had imagined that he would bring a recent scandal to an end by killing himself: a pitiful tragedy, from all the mire and blood of which the scandal had sprouted afresh with the most luxuriant and indestructible vegetation. No, no! suicide was not the course to follow: a man ought to remain erect, and struggle on to his very last copper, and the very end ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... and did not take part in the inheritance. On the other hand, misfortune and want need not be feared for the inmate of the convent. If a nun were lost to the joys of the world, she was lost to its cares. To make such a choice, to commit temporal suicide, the very young should surely not be admitted. Yet it was not until 1768 that the time for taking final vows was advanced to the very moderate age of twenty-one for young men and eighteen for girls.[Footnote: Rambaud, ii. 45. Mathieu, 43. Chassin, 25. Boiteau, 176. ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... unexpectedly answered my first question at last, "someone could just naturally pot him easy enough. But I got a hunch that he couldn't get fur enough away to feel safe afterward. The fellow with a hankering for a good useful kind of suicide could get it right there. Any candidates? You-all been looking kinda mournful lately, Windy; s'pose you be the human benefactor and rid the world ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... head approvingly. Oh, no, I forget. There's one little matter over which I should have got lectured and that is my rejection of so eligible a bachelor as Mr. Ingram, on the mere ground that I couldn't overlook his past life. Anyhow, he hasn't committed suicide, though I fancy he has ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... trifoliate leaves, and may have been held sacred on this account. The practice of Sati or the self-immolation of widows has also been given divine authority by the story that Sati was Siva's first wife, and that she committed suicide because she and her husband were not invited to Daksha's sacrifice. [373] Siva's famous consort is the multiform Devi, Kali or Parvati, of whom some notice is given elsewhere. [374] The cult of Siva has produced the ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... Shakespeare he would then have written Troilus and Cressida to brand the offending sex; but being only a little dog, he began to bite them. The surprise of the ladies whom he attacked indicated the monstrosity of his offence; but he had fairly beaten off his better angel, fairly committed moral suicide; for almost in the same hour, throwing aside the last rags of decency, he proceeded to attack the aged also. The fact is worth remark, showing, as it does, that ethical laws are common both to dogs and men; and that with both a single deliberate violation ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 1861, had been successfully opposed by Lane (Robinson, Kansas Conflict, 458). There will be other occasions to refer to him in this narrative. He is believed to have held the secret that induced Lane to commit suicide ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... gentleman in the poem evidently mixed up his dates slightly, for he says this incident occurred when Clive was twenty-one, and he represents him as committing suicide twenty-five years afterwards. Clive was actually forty-nine when he took ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... (95-46 B.C.), commonly called Cato of Utica, was a stalwart defender of Roman republicanism against Caesar and his party. His suicide after the defeat of the republican cause at Thapsus was regarded as an act of ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... sat on his trunk in the tiny hall bedroom, and in the afternoon papers read of his suicide, his eyes were lit with pleasurable pride. Not at the nice things the obituaries told of his past, but because his act of self-sacrifice, so carefully considered, had been carried to success. As he read Jimmie smiled ...
— Somewhere in France • Richard Harding Davis
... clear of Greenwich, "there is one portion of my history which you do not know—a very trifling part indeed. When I saw in the newspapers that my husband had, as I supposed, been executed, I am ashamed to say that I first thought of suicide; but my better feelings prevailed, and I then resolved to change my name and to let people suppose that I was dead. It was for that reason that I left my bonnet by the river-side and all my apparel in the house, ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... hours every day to his society. She lent him money, interceded with his parents on his behalf, corrected his proofs, acted as a severe and candid though sympathetic critic, and above all cheered and encouraged him, and prevented him from committing suicide in his dark days of distress. On the other hand, the friendship of a man like Balzac must have been of absorbing interest to a woman of great delicacy of feeling, and evidently considerable literary powers, whose surroundings were uncongenial; and his warm and ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... all wise men, he says, wished the National Assembly to continue its sittings as the first Legislative Assembly. But no attention was paid to the wishes of the enlightened friends of liberty; and the generous but fatal suicide was perpetrated. Now the fact is that Barere, far from opposing this ill-advised measure, was one of those who most eagerly supported it; that he described it from the tribune as wise and magnanimous; that he assigned, as ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Testament, like Jephthah and Abraham, thought to make themselves specially pleasing to the Lord by sacrificing their children to Him as burnt offerings. If the ethics of their moral code had permitted suicide, they might with some show of justice have offered themselves, if they thought that the first-born kid would not do; but what right had they to offer up their sons and daughters in return for supposed ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... that we may without danger or collision build batteries to take them. Armament by the Federal sovereignty is war, armament by State authority is peace." And it will forever remain a marvel that a President of the United States consented to this certain process of national suicide. ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... proved, of course, an unhappy one. After the birth of two children, a separation, by mutual consent, took place, and Mrs Shelley committed suicide. ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... concluding that the prisoners had escaped, and that he might expect to be punished, perhaps capitally, for neglect of duty, he resolved to anticipate such a fate, and snatched his sword to commit suicide. At this moment, a voice issuing from the dungeon where the missionaries were confined, at once dispelled his fears as to the prisoners, and arrested him almost in the very act of self-murder. "Paul cried with a loud voice, saying—Do thyself no harm, for we are all here." [95:2] ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... without other nervous symptoms, suffered vehemently by the persistent recurrence of a visual image which entirely absorbed his attention. He knew exactly the development of his trouble. A woman acquaintance of his had committed suicide by poisoning herself. He knew her slightly and the emotion of personal loss played hardly any role in the case. But he had met her at a gay dinner a short time before her death. The news of the suicide came to him when he was overtired ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... Suicide is never committed unless a person is drunk and angered by some slight or by jealousy. At one time there was a veritable epidemic of suicides among the Indians near Guachochic, the men hanging themselves with their girdles; one of them even suspended ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... astonishment declared that he never was in a gaol in his life. Mr. Baldwin being foiled after putting the question in various ways, turned round to his friendly prompter, and asked for what the man had been imprisoned. He was told that it was for suicide. Thereupon Mr. Baldwin, with great gravity and solemnity addressed the witness: "Now, sir, I ask you upon your oath, and remember that I shall have your words taken down, were you not imprisoned in Gloucester gaol ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... and left it alongside of him, and turned his head away considerate-like and thoughtful while Rawlett handed him a box of rat pizon over the counter, in case he preferred suthin' more quiet. Well, what did 'Lige do? Nothin'! Smiled kinder sickly, looked sorter wild, and shut up. He didn't suicide much. No, sir! He didn't kill himself,—not he. Why, old Bixby—and he's a deacon in good standin'—allowed, in 'Lige's hearin' and for 'Lige's benefit, that self-destruction was better nor bad example, and proved it by Scripture too. And yet 'Lige did nothin'! Desp'rit! He's ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... for opposing the freedom of the ballot. Bad local government is certainly a great evil, which ought to be prevented; but to violate the freedom and sanctities of the suffrage is more than an evil. It is a crime which, if persisted in, will destroy the Government itself. Suicide is not a remedy. If in other lands it be high treason to compass the death of the king, it shall be counted no less a crime here to strangle our sovereign power and stifle ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... was at the lowest stage of despair, and had taken more than one look over the parapet of London Bridge with a view to suicide, he received a letter from a long-neglected brother, who had for many years dwelt on the Continent, partly for economy and partly for a son's health. The brother offered him a home in the south of France for the winter, as it would do his wife good, he said, and he had room in his ...
— The Island Queen • R.M. Ballantyne
... he was an officer in the German Army, and on the strength of that rumour his parents were ordered by the Chief Constable to leave the village and not to dwell on the East Coast. It was a sentence of death on them. The order broke the old man's heart, and he committed suicide. The son arrived to find his father dead and his mother distracted by her bereavement. He took her away to the seaside for a rest, but on their return to the village she, too, committed suicide. And the jury did not say "Killed by Slander": they said "Suicide while ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... pin it down to with any real certainty," Kessler said. "No mechanical defects that we're sure of, no sabotage we can put our finger on, no murder or suicide schemes, nothing! We've put that plane back together so perfectly that it could almost fly again! We've got dossiers an inch thick on practically everybody who was aboard, crew and passengers. We've done six months' ...
— The Last Straw • William J. Smith
... sacrificial revolt. And can any of us wonder that when even this tragic seeding of the martyrs proved unfruitful, many of the Russian youth, brooding over the irremediable wrongs of their people, were driven to insanity and suicide? And, if all that was possible, would it be surprising if it also happened that at least one flaming rebel should have developed a philosophy of warfare no less terrible than that of the Russian bureaucracy itself? I do not know, nor would I allow myself to suggest, ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... fetching and carrying of life,—a great number of them certainly,—his real life was absolutely uninteresting, and if he had faced it as realistically as such people do in Mr. Gissing's novels, he would probably have come by way of drink to suicide in the course of a year. But that was just what he had the natural wisdom not to do. On the contrary, he was always decorating his existence with imaginative tags, hopes, and poses, deliberate and yet quite effectual self-deceptions; his experiences were mere ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... to crushing labor or to enforced idleness, always under the threat of the whip or of torture, slaves became, according to their nature, either melancholy and savage, or lazy and subservient. The most energetic of them committed suicide; the others led a life that was merely mechanical. "The slave," said Cato the Elder, "ought always to work or to sleep." The majority of them lost all sense of honor. And so they used to call a mean act "servile," that ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... that he had died a few minutes after ten o'clock that morning from uraemia of the blood—the surgeon of the French Legation being in attendance almost to the last. A certificate issued later by this gentleman immediately quieted the rumours of suicide, though many still refused to believe that he was actually dead. "I did not wish this end," he is reported to have whispered hoarsely a few minutes before he expired, "I did not wish to be Emperor. Those around me said that the people wanted a king and named me for the Throne. ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... he cried, shaking his hands with outspread fingers in front of him. "They have no manners, no decency, no self-respect. It's a regular trade. They go and get knocked down by automobiles on purpose, so that they can claim indemnity. They breed dogs especially and train them to commit suicide under the wheels so that they can get compensation. There's one now—ah, sacree bete!" He leaned over the side of the car and exchanged violent objurgation with the dog. "But never mind. So long as I am here you can run over anything you ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... pessimists considered suicide as an escape from the futility of life, neighbors resurrected buried hatchets. Friends found fault with friends. Enemies vowed to kill each other as soon as the wind ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... might become a gloomy recluse, and produce pictures which the multitude would never know were painted with tears and blood. "Of course, I don't mean literally; the idea is rather disgusting; but you know what I mean, Cornelia. He may commit suicide, like that French painter, Robert; but he doesn't seem one of that kind, exactly; he's much more likely to abandon art and become an art-critic. Yes, it may make an art-critic ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... drag himself into a drain, in which he was afterwards discovered and brought out to execution. The younger Robespierre threw himself from the window, but had not the good fortune to perish on the spot. It seemed as if even the melancholy fate of suicide, the last refuge of guilt and despair, was denied to men who had so long refused every species of mercy to their fellow-creatures. Le Bas alone had calmness enough to despatch himself with a pistol-shot. Saint ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Supplementary Number, Issue 263, 1827 • Various
... purpose, to convince himself that his real duty lay, not in renouncing the Westmore money and its obligations, but in carrying out his projected task as if nothing had occurred to affect his personal relation to it. The mere fact that such a renunciation would have been a deliberate moral suicide, a severing once for all of every artery of action, made it take on, at first, the semblance of an obligation, a sort of higher duty to the abstract conception of what he owed himself. But Justine had not erred in her forecast. Once she had passed out ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... structures as shatters to dust the pride of the works of men. He was down among them, lower than the herd, rolling in vulgar epithets that, attached to one like him, became of monstrous distortion. O fool! dolt! blind ass! tottering idiot! drunken masquerader! miserable Jack Knave, performing suicide with that blessed coxcomb air of curling a lock!—Clotilde! Clotilde! Where has one read the story of a man who had the jewel of jewels in his hand, and flung in into the deeps, thinking that he flung a pebble? Fish, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... knew much of the old masters of Europe, took Alfonso to see the Musee Wiertz, which contains all the works of a highly gifted and eccentric master. In a kind of distemper Wiertz painted Napoleon in the Infernal Region, Vision of a Beheaded Man, A Suicide, The Last Cannon, Curiosity, and Contest of Good and Evil, Hunger, Madness and Crime, etc. As Brussels is located near the center of Belgium, the city is very convenient to several cities that contain many works attractive to painters ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... beside philosophers. It is not without example, that men have committed suicide, because they have attained their utmost wishes. The man of business, finding himself possessed of a sufficient fortune, retires from active life; but the habit of action remains, and becomes a power of terrific force. In such cases, the sufferer ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... more I thought about going down that ladder, the more I didn't feel like going down. Well, I felt that I had rather die than go down that ladder. I'm honest in this. I felt like jumping off and committing suicide rather than go down that ladder. I crossed right over the frightful chasm, but when forbearance ceased to be a virtue, I tremblingly put my foot on the first rung, then grabbed the top of the two projections. There I remained, I ...
— "Co. Aytch" - Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment - or, A Side Show of the Big Show • Sam R. Watkins
... peculiar feature of Death by Suicide is that it is not only self-inflicted but sudden. And there are many sins which must either be dealt with suddenly or not at all. Natural Law, Mortification, ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... say. "This world is the real hell, ending in the eternal naught. The dreams of a life beyond and of re-union there are but a demon's mocking breathed into the mortal heart, lest by its universal suicide mankind should rob him of his torture-pit. There is no truth in all your father taught you" (he was a clergyman and rather eminent in his profession), "there is no hope for man, there is nothing he can win except the deep happiness ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... good-looking person; Rosie, the prettiest little sixteen-year-old Italian girl; and I. Such conversations! One day they unearthed Harry Thaw and Evelyn Nesbit and redid their past, present, and probable future. We discussed whether Olive Thomas had really committed suicide or died of an overdose of something. How many nights a week could a girl dance and work next day? Minnie was past her dancing days. She'd been married 'most twenty years and was getting fat and unformed-looking; shuffled about ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... throw myself out of window—I should take poison—I should pine and die. I know I should," Miss cried, who had nevertheless gone through one or two affairs of the heart without any idea of suicide. ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... where the quantity of bank food is far smaller, this rule will perhaps not hold good; though who knows not that his best fish are generally taken under some tree from which the little caterpillars, having determined on slow and deliberate suicide are letting themselves down gently by a silken thread into the mouth of the spotted monarch, who has but to sail about and about, and pick them up one by one as they touch the stream?—A sight which ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... a young laird had languished in a state of madness for six years in the prison there, and had at last committed suicide. Poor deranged human nature flew to death as a remedy against torture. At Forfar, prisoners were chained to the bedstead; at Berwick, to the walls of their cells; and at Newcastle to a ring in the floor. The ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... him unharmed. Moreover, wooden as they sometimes are, these great antagonists and their fellow-senators show the right Roman nature at need. Marius sleeping quietly under the menace of death; his heroic son, with his little band of soldiers, committing suicide rather than surrender at Praeneste; Octavius scorning to imitate the vacillation and cowardice of his colleagues; Sylla plunging back alone into battle, that his example may reanimate the courage of his fleeing army: ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... said he, recovering himself, "I accept this sisterly love as a sick man accepts the bitter medicine which he will not cast away lest he commit suicide. I accept you as my sister, but a sister must at least have confidence in her brother; she must not stand before him like a sealed book whose contents he is ignorant of. If I am to be your brother, I demand also the rights of a brother. ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... far away from Rudolph, far from China itself, to touch a hundred ports and islands, Cebu and Sourabaya, Tavoy and Selangor. They talked of men and women, a death at Zamboanga, a birth at Chittagong, of obscure heroism or suicide, and fortunes made or lost; while the two boys, gentle, melancholy, gliding silent in bright blue robes, spread a white tablecloth, clamped it with shining brass, and laid the tiffin. Then the talk flowed on, the feast made a tiny clatter of jollity in the slumbering noon, in the silence of ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... was aware, nevertheless, how strong the feeling was in others. She had not lived in India for nothing. Marriage with Shere Ali was impossible, even had she wished for it. It meant ostracism and social suicide. ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... anchorite. Joe Garland lives like a good fellow. Who has extracted the most from life? We are paid to live, you know. When the wages are too meagre we throw up the job, which is the cause, believe me, of all rational suicide. Joe Garland would starve to death on the wages you get from life. You see, he is made differently. So would you starve on his wages, which are ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... yet were seen on sea or land. Grim faces leer at the dreamer and make mock of him; frightful animals pass in procession before him; and hosts of incoherent words are jabbered in his ear by unholy voices. He wakes, limp, exhausted, trembling, nauseated, and he feels as if he must choose between suicide and—more drink. If he drinks at this stage, he is lost; and then is the time to fix upon him and draw him by ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... Antoine to saddle them and we would ride. The tall lady took it in dead earnest, and throwing her arms around Antoine's neck begged him not to commit suicide. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... veranda, but he had gone directly to his room without meeting any one. The first intimation which he had received of any unusual occurrence the next morning was when his mother entered his room and told him that Mr. Mainwaring had either been murdered or had committed suicide, no one ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... pistol in my pocket, but it would have been suicide to shoot except as a last resort. When a Mongol "starts anything" he is sure to finish it; he is not like a Chinese, who will usually run at the first shot. We stood for at least three minutes with that wall of scowling brutes ten feet away. They were ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... later Dennie came out—endways. With a number nine boot just behind him. Mickie tenderly assisted his father to his feet and started him homeward. Dennie had now reached the crying stage; nobody loved him; he thought he should commit suicide; in the morning. ...
— Continuous Vaudeville • Will M. Cressy
... His counsels. He cannot precipitate them any more than a man in a state of happiness can commit suicide. Doubtless it is undeniable that a man may arm his hand with a sword: and that his flesh will be found penetrable to the sword, happy or not. But this apparent physical power has no existence, no value for a creature having a double nature: the moral nature not only indisposes him to use his ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... great morning which rises out of the Eastern Sea, and be himself one of the children of the light." "Trust thyself, every heart vibrates to that iron string. There is a time in each man's education when he must arrive at the conviction that imitation is suicide; when he must take himself for better or worse as his portion; and know that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which it was ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... good many highly interested relatives, and, as a natural consequence, there is some talk of getting him certified. They're afraid he may do something involving the estate or develop homicidal tendencies, and they talk of possible suicide—you remember his father's death—but I say that's all bunkum. The fellow is just a bit ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... is the very date upon which he died," muttered Kendale. "This must have been written just before he committed suicide. Well, we will see what he had ...
— Mischievous Maid Faynie • Laura Jean Libbey
... enough of this, Agostino," said he. "You have gone near your death; and had you died, you had died a suicide and had been damned—deserving it for your folly if for ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... morsels, although at the same time it was thought that he sometimes took food "on the sly." A careful examination showed absolutely no sign of bodily disease. He was admitted to a ward for treatment by hypnotic suggestion, but before this could be begun he endeavoured to commit suicide by setting ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... Chief roared wrathfully into his transmitter: "Quiet! This crazy fool's tried to commit suicide for all of us! How about it? Why can't we get ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... "Yes," she answered; "suicide party. And I suppose, with our ship wrecked, our admiral dead, and contact with Leider not even made as yet, it's become doubly so. But we've got ...
— The Winged Men of Orcon - A Complete Novelette • David R. Sparks
... be prolonged both by removing many of the physical causes of death, and by making men more rational and religious, more willing and able to deny themselves those indulgences which are but a kind of slow suicide. ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... on the next track. I didn't change from the one train to the other until the train for Rome started to move. Then I slipped out, and jumped for the moving platform, and was bundled into my right carriage by a guard, who thought I was trying to commit an Anna Karenina suicide—until I gave him ten francs. Whether I got away unnoticed or not I can't say for sure. But Pobloff will have resources here that we know nothing of. From now on, you may be sure, he will have Keenan watched by one of his agents, ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... were, there is little reason to believe that shortages would not have developed. After all, a good many of the suppliers were Loyalists, and others were indifferent to the cause of American liberty. Even the most patriotic pharmacists were faced with a complete financial suicide, caught between a spiraling inflation and a Congress that had no money and only a promise ...
— Drug Supplies in the American Revolution • George B. Griffenhagen
... pictured the heavenly bodies as hastening to their own destruction by dashing themselves, like so many gigantic moths, into the sun. Cleanthes however did not conceive mere mechanical force to be at work in this matter. The grand apotheosis of suicide which he foresaw was a voluntary act; for the heavenly bodies were Gods and were willing to lose their own ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... more wan than heaven wide, For land of soot and fog am bound, For land of smoke and suicide— And right good ...
— Enamels and Cameos and other Poems • Theophile Gautier
... strength well spent, which is the strength renewed. In manhood must he find his competence; In his clear mind the spiritual food: God being there while he his fight maintains; Throughout his mind the Master Mind being there, While he rejects the suicide despair; Accepts the spur of explicable pains; Obedient to Nature, not her slave: Her lord, if to her rigid laws he bows; Her dust, if with his conscience he plays knave, And bids the Passions on the Pleasures browse:- Whence Evil in a world unread ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... one's child, one's slave, are only apparently and by a conventional illusion of language one's real and actual "possession." That this is the case can be proved by the fact that any of these "human possessions" has only to commit suicide, to escape for ever from ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... Byron's attention, went up to him and asked him whether she might waltz. Byron replied, half-absently, that he saw no reason why she should not; upon which her pride and her passion became so excited that she seized hold of a knife, and feigned to commit suicide. The ball was at once at an end, and all London was soon filled with accounts of this incident. Lady L—— had scarcely recovered from the slight wound she had inflicted on herself, when she wrote to a ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... is a wonderful world, but there are lots of crackpots. They'll do anything! The police daren't let it even be suspected that deathrays can be made! That's why you weren't charged with murder. People all over the planet would start doing research, hoping to satisfy all their grudges by committing suicide for all their enemies with themselves! For the sake of civilization your secret has to be suppressed—and you with it. It's terrible for you, Bron, but ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... in the position of chronic convalescence; he looked to his dinner to give him the utmost degree of pleasurable sensation, and hitherto he had procured such sensations daily. Who dares to bid farewell to old habit? Many a man on the brink of suicide has been plucked back on the threshold of death by the thought of the cafe where he plays his nightly ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... question at issue—whether or not Herrick's death had been his own premeditated act—still wrapped in its original mystery. This singular law, which had the possible effect of inducing high almoners to encourage suicide among well-to-do persons of the lower and ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... 'He ray-fuses to answer.' 'Good. Th' case is clear. Cap forged th' will. Th' coort will now adjourn f'r dools, an' all ladin' officers iv th' ar-rmy not in disgrace already will assimble in jail, an' com-mit suicide,' he says. 'Jackuse,' says Zola, an' started f'r th' woods, pursued be his fellow-editors. He's off somewhere in a three now hollerin' 'Jackuse' at ivry wan that passes, sufferin' martyrdom f'r his counthry an' writin' now an' thin ...
— Mr. Dooley in Peace and in War • Finley Peter Dunne
... tempted to stay, the idea held my mind and fascinated it, but with the vision of death came the recoil from it born from the remembrance of my art. The same recoil that had saved me many times before, for youth is usually greatly inclined to suicide, either directly or indirectly in the dangers it courts. But in an artist this is strangely balanced by his love for his work. When he has ceased to wish for life or heed it for himself he still feels instinctive revolt against extinguishing that diviner ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... say to himself; "for this people has turned all things upside down. Their happiness is misery, their wisdom is bewilderment, their truth is self-deception, their speech is a disguise, their science is the parent of error, their life is a process of suicide, their god is the worm that dieth not and the fire that is not quenched. What is believed is not professed, and what is professed is not believed. In yonder place"—he was looking at London—"there is darkness and misery enough for seven hells. Verily they ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... replied the man, scowling angrily. "If I hadn't stopped you land knows but you would have been over the falls. What's the matter with you fellows, anyhow? Can't you take a joy ride without committing murder and suicide ?" ...
— The Motor Girls on a Tour • Margaret Penrose
... Reddy doesn't want to commit suicide just yet. He's only going to make sure the old chap is at home, then he'll make ...
— The Outdoor Chums After Big Game - Or, Perilous Adventures in the Wilderness • Captain Quincy Allen
... whispered Myrtle, clinging to Beth's arm with trembling fingers, "I'm afraid he's going to—to commit suicide!" ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces and Uncle John • Edith Van Dyne
... The pillars against which he often leaned still stand, the thresholds over which he passed are there, the pavements ring beneath your tread as they once rang beneath his. Three generations and more have come and gone since Napoleon trod the streets of Toulon contemplating suicide. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... kill myself because I felt that to be a coward's death, and in such a way I thought that I would only separate myself from her. But in the war, perhaps, I might meet death in such a way as to show him that I despised him both for myself and her. By suicide I would be paying him reverence.... Some such thought also had Andrey Vassilievitch. I heard that he thought of attaching himself to some Red Cross Otriad. I told him my plans. He said no more, but suddenly, ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... within—and yet when, in better moments, her natural kindness breaks through the cloud, then she tells you that no word of counsel, no tone of moral teaching, ever fell upon her ear. When she looks forward from a life of misery to a death by suicide, you cannot but feel that there is no condition so degraded as not to be visited by gleams of a higher nature, and rejoice that He alone will judge the sin who knows also the temptation. Again, how strongly are the happiness of virtue and the misery of vice contrasted. The morning scene ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... in their hands just missing their trains. The next best thing to doing nothing yourself is to observe everybody else trying to do something, like catching trains, and not succeeding. My uncle once missed eight trains in one day, and then tried to commit suicide. But next day he caught nine trains and a motor 'bus, which reconciled him to living, ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... Robert. Now, however, he threw his medical reserve, generally his strongest characteristic, to the winds. He insisted on telling his companion, who listened reluctantly, the whole miserable and ghastly story of the old squire's suicide. He described the heir's summons, his arrival just in time for the last scene with all its horrors, and that mysterious condition of the squire for some months afterwards, when no one, not even Mrs. Darcy, had been admitted to the Hall, and old Meyrick, ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to Crim Tartary, and the present Crimea, swept southward and westward about the middle of the seventh century, and Greek records tell how they took and sacked the capital of Phrygia and put to death or forced to suicide the ...
— The Ancient East • D. G. Hogarth
... life, and thus rush into the presence of his Maker before he is called. We are of the opinion of Hamlet that God has "fixed his canon 'gainst self-slaughter." Would you believe it, my dear brother, in this city they actually facilitate suicide! A race of philosophers has arisen in the last fifty years who argue that, as man was not consulted about his coming into the world, he has a perfect right to leave it whenever it becomes uncomfortable. These strange arguments were supplemented by the economists, always ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... relates the instance of a woman of forty, who when six months pregnant was run over by railway cars. After a double amputation of the legs she miscarried and made a good recovery. Neugebauer reported the history of a case of a woman who, while near her term of pregnancy, committed suicide by jumping from a window. She ruptured her uterus, and a dead child with a fracture of the parietal bone was found in the abdominal cavity. Staples speaks of a Swede of twenty-eight, of Minnesota, who was accidentally shot by a young man riding by her side in a wagon. The ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... this animal were Seius, Dollabella, Cassius, and Anthony. The first of them was executed, the rest committed suicide. ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... Monument-yard informed the writer that he happened to be standing at his door talking to a neighbour, and looking up at the top of the pillar, exclaimed, "Why, here's the flag coming down." "Flag!" answered the other, "it's a man." The words were hardly uttered when the suicide fell within ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... messages ever discussed more ethical questions that women should know about and get straight in their minds. As it is, some of your ideas are not at all understood by them; your strenuous-life theory, for instance, your factory-law ideas, and particularly your race-suicide arguments. Men don't fully understand them, for that matter; women certainly ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... despairing of humanity, the victim sought peace and forgetfulness in suicide. Marquis, do you know of any infamy ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume II (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... former is wonderfully strong; a confined bird will at the proper season beat her breast against the wires of her cage, until it is bare and bloody. It causes young salmon to leap out of the fresh water, in which they could continue to exist, and thus unintentionally to commit suicide. Every one knows how strong the maternal instinct is, leading even timid birds to face great danger, though with hesitation, and in opposition to the instinct of self-preservation. Nevertheless, the migratory instinct is so ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... thoughts are sometimes hidden under the simplicity of rustic expression. He told me the story of a man who, having gone by night to throw himself into the Puit de Padirac, came in contact with a tough old bush during his descent which held him up. By this time the would-be suicide disliked the feeling of falling so much that, so far from trying to free himself from the bush and begin again, he held on to it with all his might and shrieked for help. But as people who are not pushed by evil spirits ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... the reaction to life. Among men who are coarse in their language there is a salutation more pertinent than elegant that inquires into the state of the bowels.[1] The famous story of Voltaire and the Englishman, in which the sage agreed to suicide because life was not worth living when his digestion was disordered and who broke his agreement when he purged himself, illustrates how closely mood is related to the intestinal tract. And mood is the background of the ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... this, it is necessary to find all possible causes, and then by testing each in succession to determine which could not have acted and leave the one that is the only actual cause. A man is found dead; death has resulted from natural causes, from murder, or from suicide. Each possible cause would be tested; and by elimination of the other possible causes the one right cause would be left. This method of elimination is frequently employed in arguments from effect to cause. When this method is used the alternatives ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... himself to death. The merchant tried to console him and dissuade him from his resolution, saying, "Brahman, why do you long to die for the loss of your wealth? Wealth, like an unseasonable cloud, suddenly comes and goes." But the Brahman would not abandon his fixed determination to commit suicide, for wealth is dearer to the miser than life itself. When he was about to depart for the holy place, the king, having heard of it, came and asked him, "Brahman, do you know of any mark by which you can distinguish the place where you buried your dinars?" ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... man that is to die, they fear the—please, what is not the paradiso? Excuse me, it is the inferno: and they tell to the priest 'Please come.' Then they pay him to tell all that is good, and sometimes the priest arrive that you will be dead. If you shall suicide, very likely you are dead before. Then shall the parents pay him to tell that the man to die has taken all the functions of religion and the holy oil to put in the foot to prevent him the death. But it is prevent ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... mystery—the disappearance without warning of a beautiful young girl, Betty Blackwell, barely eighteen. Her family, the police, and now the District Attorney had sought to solve it in vain. Some had thought it a kidnaping, others a suicide, and others had even hinted at murder. All sorts of theories had been advanced without in the least changing the original dominant note of mystery. Photographs of the young woman had been published broadcast, I knew, without ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... Class? He never shirks kingly honours—he accepts them not for himself, but for the glory of us all. The greatest weapon of those who rule the world, Sandip Babu has told us, is the hypnotism of their display. To take the vow of poverty would be for them not merely a penance—it would mean suicide." ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... coquetries, sudden quarrels, fits of jealousy, and tender reconciliations, played by the two sisters. Colette with her beauty, Wanda with her talent, her impishness, her graceful and voluptuous attitudes, electrified the spectators, especially in a long monologue, in which Pierrot contemplated suicide, made more effective by the passionate and heart-piercing strains of the Hungarian's violin, so that old Rochette cried out: "What a pity such a wonder should not be upon the stage!" La Rochette, now retired into private life, wearing an old dress, with her gray hair and her black eyes, ...
— Jacqueline, v3 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... the purple upon the suicide of Nero, dismissed the Batavian life-guards to whom he owed his elevation. He is murdered, Otho and Vitellius contend for the succession, while all eyes are turned upon the eight Batavian regiments. In their hands the scales of empire seem to rest. They ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... sudden calamity which leaves no room for consideration. Such self-murders as those of Jocasta, Haemon, Eurydice, and lastly of Dejanira, appear merely in the light of a subordinate appendage in the tragical pictures of Sophocles; but the suicide of Ajax is a cool determination, a free action, and of sufficient importance to become the principal subject of the piece. It is not the last fatal crisis of a slow mental malady, as is so often the case in these more effeminate modern times; still less is it that more theoretical disgust of ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... suicide rate is much higher in the cities than in other districts. In general the suicide rate in the United States seems to be two or three times as high in our large cities as in ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... taught him a certain insight into his own personality and he realized that his greedy little subconscious had collected all the cues and signals from the encounter at the spaceport and goaded him into a line of action that looked uncomfortably like suicide. The arrival of the stranger, the threat to himself, the automatic assumption by the Pyrrans that they would take care of him. Apparently his ego and his subconscious felt that he had been taken care of too long. They ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey
... locked up the apartment and went down to the store. To make a scene in a fifty-cent cafe was not worth the effort, Trudy had once proclaimed, but to run the gauntlet of real rough-house emotion in a jewellery store frequented by his clientele would be social suicide. The only thing was to make Beatrice pay a larger commission on the things for her new tea house so that he could pay for this red-haired vixen's ring. But this would not in the least dim the red-haired vixen's triumph, which was the issue at stake. From that moment ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... Valgrand murdered his dresser, for some reason unknown to us. Then, overcome by his crime, he went mad and committed suicide. Of ...
— The Exploits of Juve - Being the Second of the Series of the "Fantmas" Detective Tales • mile Souvestre and Marcel Allain
... the first flight of aero-subs, behind which another flight was winging swiftly into action, American flyers tilted the noses of their planes over and dived under full power—to sure death by suicide, though none knew it ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... excitement of this awful cataclysm. All London has been awake for a week. Soldiers are marching day and night; immense throngs block the streets about the government offices. But they are all very orderly. Every day Germans are arrested on suspicion; and several of them have committed suicide. Yesterday one poor American woman yielded to the excitement and cut her throat. I find it hard to get about much. People stop me on the street, follow me to luncheon, grab me as I come out of any committee meeting—to know my opinion of this or that—how can ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... occurred in our prison: The artist K., whom the reader knows already, ended his life in suicide by flinging himself from the table with his head against the stone floor. The fall and the force of the blow had been so skilfully calculated by the unfortunate young man that his skull was split in two. The grief ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... the hard terms; but even to her the case seemed like a desperate one, and she was willing at last to try the experiment, though she intended to follow the ship wherever she went, to save him from suicide when his situation became absolutely hopeless. The terms arranged, she followed Mr. Lowington on deck, where Clyde was discovered in the loving embrace of the big boatswain, who released him as soon ...
— Up The Baltic - Young America in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark • Oliver Optic
... all good angels seemed to have abandoned her. In the old days she could never bear to hear or see bodily suffering in any of God's meanest creatures, without trying to succour them; and now, in her rush to the awful death of the suicide, she stayed her wild steps, and turned to find from whom that sharp sound of anguish ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... Getz. "Ready to pick you off. Come! It is suicide for you to try to go out the front way now. Follow me; I have news for you. ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler
... not many of the women in this class expect to live more than ten years after they enter upon their voluntary or involuntary life of white slavery. Perhaps the average is less than that. Many died painful deaths by disease, many by consumption, but it is hardly beyond the truth to say that suicide is their general expectation. "We all come to it sooner or later," one of the witnesses remarked to her companions in the jail, the other day, when reading in the newspaper of the suicide of a girl ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... his vanity, —such a life, found only in Paris, and offering daily the charm of some new thing, was now more than habit,—it had become to Philippe as much a necessity as his tobacco or his brandy. He saw plainly that he could not live without these continual enjoyments. The idea of suicide came into his head; not on account of the deficit which must soon be discovered in his accounts, but because he could no longer live with Mariette in the atmosphere of pleasure in which he had disported himself for over a year. Full ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... the letters of people who have committed suicide; and also of people who only threaten to do so. The first may be got abundantly from reports of coroners' inquests, the second would be harder to ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... schoolmaster. He had written spirited verses in his youth; and though his muse had become mournful, she continued to sing. His end was melancholy: the unfortunate circumstances of his life preyed upon his mind, and in a paroxysm of phrensy he committed suicide. He died in the vicinity of Portsmouth, in the beginning of April 1810, about six weeks before the similar death of his friend, Robert Tannahill. A person of much ingenuity and scholarship, Robertson, with ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various |
