Alone in Berlin (Jeder stirbt für sich allein, 'Everyone dies for himself alone') opens in Berlin in 1940, as the postwoman Eva Kluge delivers to Otto and Anna Quangel the news that their only son has been killed in the invasion of France. The Quangels live in a tenement at 55 Jablonski Strasse with neighbours who represent the range of life under Nazism: the Persickes, a family of brutal Party loyalists; old Frau Rosenthal, a Jewish widow whose flat is looted and who is hounded until she jumps to her death; and retired judge Fromm, who quietly helps where he can.
Medical tag
Suicide
Suicide, suicidal ideation, self-destruction.
Works
Subtitled 'Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future', Beyond Good and Evil was Nietzsche's attempt to restate in plain argumentative prose, divided into 296 numbered sections and a closing poem, the ideas that Thus Spoke Zarathustra had put in prophetic form. The preface opens by supposing that truth is a woman and that dogmatic philosophers, with their clumsy seriousness, have never known how to win her.
BUtterfield 8, named for a fashionable Manhattan telephone exchange, is set in New York in 1931, in the last years of Prohibition and the early Depression, among speakeasies, apartment hotels and the blurred borderland between respectable society and its demimonde. Its central figure is Gloria Wandrous, a beautiful, intelligent young woman who drinks heavily, sleeps with men who interest her and lives partly on their generosity, while refusing to see herself as a kept woman or a prostitute.
Cannery Row is a loosely plotted, affectionate portrait of the sardine-cannery district of Monterey, California, during the Depression, built from short narrative chapters alternating with self-contained vignettes or 'inter-chapters'. Its centre is Doc, a gentle, learned marine biologist who runs the Western Biological Laboratory, collects specimens from the tide pools, listens to Gregorian chant and Bach, reads poetry, and is trusted by everyone on the Row.
Carmilla is a Gothic vampire novella narrated by Laura, the nineteen-year-old daughter of an Englishman who retired from the Austrian service and bought a lonely castle in the forests of Styria. A brief prologue presents the story as a case from the papers of the physician Doctor Hesselius and notes that its narrator has since died.
Chess (Schachnovelle, also translated as The Royal Game or Chess Story) is narrated by a passenger on a liner sailing from New York to Buenos Aires shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War. Aboard is the world chess champion Mirko Czentovic, a stolid, almost illiterate son of a poor Danube boatman who was raised by a village priest, revealed an uncanny talent for chess, and now plays mechanically and greedily for money, showing no curiosity about anything else.
City of God is Augustine’s monumental argument that Rome’s disaster does not discredit Christianity and that human history must be understood through two loves. The immediate occasion is the sack of Rome by Alaric in 410, after which critics blamed Christians for weakening the old gods.
Parker's Complete Poems gathers the light verse that made her one of the best-selling poets of the 1920s and 1930s. The core of the volume is her three collections, Enough Rope (1926), Sunset Gun (1928) and Death and Taxes (1931), which were combined in Not So Deep as a Well (1936), together with uncollected and early verse published in magazines from the 1910s onward.
Crime and Punishment follows Rodion Raskolnikov, an impoverished former student in St. Petersburg, as he murders the pawnbroker Alyona Ivanovna and her sister Lizaveta while testing an idea about extraordinary persons who may step over ordinary law. Dostoevsky makes the crime happen early, so the central drama becomes not detection alone but the decomposition of Raskolnikov's theory inside his body, mind, and relationships.
David Copperfield is the first-person autobiography of a novelist looking back on his life. David is born at Blunderstone in Suffolk six months after his father's death, on a night when his formidable great-aunt Betsey Trotwood storms out on learning he is not a girl.
Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem covers the last twenty-four hours or so of Willy Loman, a sixty-three-year-old travelling salesman, interwoven with his memories and imaginings of the past. Willy returns early to his small Brooklyn house, now hemmed in by apartment buildings, because he can no longer keep the car on the road: his mind keeps drifting.
Modelled on Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods, Hume's Dialogues are narrated by Pamphilus, a young man, to his friend Hermippus, and report a conversation at the house of Pamphilus's tutor, Cleanthes. Three speakers debate not whether God exists, which all profess to accept, but what can be known of God's nature by reason.
Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers gathers short texts from Christianity’s formative generations after the apostles. The collection usually includes 1 Clement, the letters of Ignatius, Polycarp’s letter, the Martyrdom of Polycarp, the Didache, the Epistle of Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hermas, 2 Clement and fragments such as Papias or the Epistle to Diognetus, depending on edition.
East of Eden is a multigenerational saga set mainly in the Salinas Valley of California from the Civil War to the First World War, which retells the story of Cain and Abel through two families: the Trasks and the Hamiltons, the latter being the narrator's own maternal ancestors. Samuel Hamilton, a poor, inventive, generous Irish immigrant farmer and blacksmith, raises a large family on barren land.
Montaigne called his pieces essais, 'trials' or 'attempts', and the word names both a method and a new literary genre. The book gathers 107 chapters in three books, ranging from one-page notes on thumbs, smells and names to the sprawling 'Apology for Raymond Sebond', which fills a sixth of the whole.
Essays and Aphorisms is the title of the selection translated by R. J. Hollingdale from Schopenhauer's Parerga and Paralipomena, the two volumes of 'appendices and omissions' he published in 1851 to make his system available to general readers. The book that resulted is the opposite of a treatise: short, sardonic, quotable pieces on suffering, death, religion, women, reading, noise, ethics and psychology, all resting on the metaphysics of his early masterpiece.
Ethics Demonstrated in Geometrical Order is set out like Euclid: definitions, axioms, numbered propositions, proofs, corollaries and the discursive notes (scholia) where Spinoza speaks most freely. Its five parts lead from God to human blessedness.
Fahrenheit 451 is set in an American city of an unspecified future where houses are fireproof and firemen no longer put out fires but start them, burning books and the houses of people who hide them. Guy Montag, a fireman of ten years, loves the work.
Faust, Part One opens with three frames: a verse Dedication, a Prelude at the Theatre in which a Manager, a Poet and a comic actor argue about what a play should be, and a Prologue in Heaven modelled on the Book of Job. There Mephistopheles mocks mankind, and the Lord permits him to tempt Doctor Faust, saying that man errs as long as he strives but that a good man keeps an instinct of the right way.
Kant's Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1785), translated by Abbott as Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, is a short book with a narrow and ambitious aim: to identify and establish the supreme principle of morality. It does not offer a full ethical system, which Kant postponed to the Metaphysics of Morals of 1797, but clears the ground by asking what must be true of moral obligation if it is to bind every rational being without exception.
Hamlet opens on the battlements of Elsinore, where sentries and the scholar Horatio see the ghost of the late King Hamlet of Denmark. Prince Hamlet, called home from university at Wittenberg for his father's funeral, is grieving and disgusted that his mother Gertrude has married his uncle Claudius, now king, within two months.
The Heroides (Heroines) is a collection of twenty-one verse letters in elegiac couplets, written as if by women of myth and legend to the men who have left, betrayed or endangered them, together with three pairs of letters exchanged between lovers. Ovid claimed to have invented the form.
This volume completes the library's surviving plays of Euripides with eleven works in Edward P. Coleridge's prose translation of 1891. Iphigenia in Aulis, produced after the poet's death in 405 BC, opens at night on the shore of Aulis, where the Greek fleet is held back by windless weather.
Jude Fawley is an orphan boy raised by his great-aunt Drusilla in the downland village of Marygreen. When the schoolmaster Richard Phillotson leaves for the university city of Christminster, Jude fixes his hopes on following him.
Julius Caesar, Shakespeare's tragedy of the assassination of 44 BC, begins as Rome celebrates Caesar's triumph over the sons of Pompey. The tribunes rebuke the fickle crowd, a soothsayer warns Caesar to beware the Ides of March, and Caesar is offered a crown three times by Mark Antony and refuses it, then falls in a fit of the falling sickness.
The Kalevala is the national epic of Finland, compiled by the physician and folklorist Elias Lönnrot from oral songs he and others gathered in Finnish and Russian Karelia. Its fifty runes, or cantos, follow the deeds of the people of Kalevala, chiefly the old singer and sage Väinämöinen, the smith Ilmarinen and the reckless Lemminkäinen, and their long rivalry with Louhi, mistress of the cold northern land of Pohjola.
Kokoro, a word meaning heart, mind or the core of things, is in three parts. In the first, 'Sensei and I', a young university student in Tokyo meets an older man at the seaside resort of Kamakura and is drawn to him, calling him Sensei, 'teacher'.
Letters from a Stoic selects from Seneca’s Moral Letters to Lucilius, a sequence of philosophical letters that turn daily life into training for freedom. Seneca writes as an older adviser to a younger friend, but the letters are also exercises for himself.
Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil was published in London in 1651, two years after the execution of Charles I, and its famous frontispiece shows a giant crowned sovereign whose body is made of hundreds of tiny subjects, holding a sword and a bishop's crozier above a peaceful town. The Introduction states the governing analogy: as art can make automata with springs for hearts and strings for nerves, so human art creates the commonwealth, an artificial man whose soul is sovereignty.
Lex, Rex: The Law and the Prince is Samuel Rutherford's answer, printed in London in October 1644, to Sacro-sancta Regum Majestas, a defence of royal absolutism by John Maxwell, the deposed bishop of Ross whom the Glasgow Assembly of 1638 had excommunicated. Rutherford wrote while Scotland and the English Parliament were allied against Charles I under the Solemn League and Covenant, and his long subtitle presents the book as a justification of Scotland's defensive wars and of its army's march to help its brethren in England.
Plutarch’s Parallel Lives set the life of a famous Greek beside that of a famous Roman, so that each could be measured by the other. Twenty-three pairs survive, most closed by a short Comparison in which Plutarch weighs the two men, together with four single Lives: Aratus, Artaxerxes, Galba, and Otho.
Lord Jim begins with an omniscient narrator describing Jim, a young English parson's son who went to sea after reading light holiday literature and dreams of heroic deeds. Injured by a falling spar, he recovers in an Eastern port and takes a berth as chief mate of the Patna, a decrepit steamer carrying eight hundred Muslim pilgrims across the Arabian Sea.
Macbeth opens on a Scottish heath where three witches plan to meet Macbeth. Returning from victory over rebels and Norwegian invaders, Macbeth and his fellow general Banquo meet the witches, who hail Macbeth as Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor and future king, and tell Banquo that his descendants will be kings.
Man's Search for Meaning has two parts. The first, Experiences in a Concentration Camp, is not a chronicle of atrocities but a psychiatrist's account of how ordinary prisoners lived, suffered and either kept or lost their inner hold on life.
Medea and Other Plays centers on Euripides’ art of making the socially powerless terrifyingly articulate. Medea begins after Jason has abandoned his foreign wife and children to marry the Corinthian princess.
Esquirol expands Pinelian alienism into a more elaborate clinical and institutional system. Mental Maladies surveys insanity as a family of disorders marked by disturbances of perception, judgment, passion, volition, and bodily function.
Moby-Dick is Herman Melville's novel of the whaling voyage of the Pequod and of her captain's pursuit of a great white sperm whale. School Launch points readers to parent-chosen selections, while the library provides the complete text of the Etymology, Extracts, one hundred thirty-five chapters and Epilogue for those who want the whole voyage.
Mourning Becomes Electra is a trilogy of plays that moves Aeschylus's Oresteia to a New England seaport town in 1865-1866, at the end of the American Civil War. The Greek house of Atreus becomes the Mannons, a proud Puritan family of shipowners and judges whose white-columned mansion, built like a Greek temple, stands apart from the town.
Mrs. Dalloway follows a single day in the middle of June 1923 in London, from a bright morning to the small hours of a party. Clarissa Dalloway, fifty-one, wife of the Conservative Member of Parliament Richard Dalloway, walks from Westminster up to Bond Street to buy flowers for the party she is giving that evening.
My Ántonia is presented as a memoir written by Jim Burden, a successful New York railroad lawyer, about a Bohemian girl he knew in his Nebraska childhood; a brief introduction by an unnamed friend frames his manuscript. Orphaned at ten, Jim travels from Virginia to live with his grandparents on the prairie near the town of Black Hawk.
No Exit and Three Other Plays is an American collection of four of Jean-Paul Sartre's plays from the years of the German occupation and just after it, in which his philosophy of freedom and responsibility is worked out on the stage. Stuart Gilbert translated No Exit and The Flies, and Lionel Abel translated Dirty Hands and The Respectful Prostitute.
Orthodoxy (1908) is G. K. Chesterton's account of how he came to believe the Christian creed. It answers a challenge from the critic G. S. Street, who, after Chesterton's Heretics (1905) had criticized the philosophies of his contemporaries, said he would begin to worry about his own philosophy when Chesterton had given his.
Othello is the tragedy of a Moorish general in the service of Venice who is brought, step by step, to murder the wife who loves him. The play opens at night in a Venetian street, where the ensign Iago, furious that Othello has promoted the Florentine Michael Cassio over him, rouses the senator Brabantio with crude news that his daughter Desdemona has eloped with the Moor.
Persian Letters is an epistolary novel made up of letters exchanged between two Persian noblemen travelling in Europe, Usbek and his younger companion Rica, and their friends, servants and wives back home in Isfahan. The letters run from 1711 to 1720, covering the last years of Louis XIV, the Regency and the collapse of John Law's financial system.
Hegel's Philosophy of Right (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts) was written as a textbook for his Berlin lectures on law, ethics and the state. Its preface is dated June 1820, and the book appeared in Berlin late that year with 1821 on the title page.
Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy of two young lovers from feuding families in Verona, compressed by Shakespeare into about four days. A sonnet Prologue announces that a pair of star-crossed lovers will end their parents' strife by their deaths.
Ruth is Gaskell's novel about a 'fallen woman', written to challenge the Victorian assumption that an unmarried mother and her child were beyond redemption. Ruth Hilton is a beautiful, innocent orphan of fifteen, apprenticed to a dressmaker, Mrs Mason, in a country town, where she works long hours in a cold workroom.
Saint Joan is Shaw's chronicle play in six scenes and an epilogue about Joan of Arc, the peasant girl from Domrémy who led the French against the English in the Hundred Years' War. In Scene I, set in 1429 at the castle of Vaucouleurs, the blustering squire Robert de Baudricourt is talked by Joan, and by his own officer Poulengey, into giving her a horse and an escort to the Dauphin; when she leaves, the hens that had stopped laying begin again.
Sanshirō follows Ogawa Sanshirō, a young graduate of the higher school in Kumamoto, through his first autumn and winter as a student at Tokyo Imperial University in the late Meiji period. The novel opens on the long train journey from Kyushu.
The Second Treatise, subtitled 'An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government', is the constructive half of Locke's Two Treatises. The First Treatise demolishes Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha, which derived the absolute power of kings from Adam's fatherly dominion.
Maupassant's stories, written mostly between 1880 and 1890, are compact, ironic and often brutal studies of French life: Norman peasants, Parisian clerks, prostitutes, bourgeois families, soldiers and the provincial gentry. This selection gathers many of the best known, which typically include the following.
Siddhartha is a short, lyrical novel set in India in the time of the Buddha, following the spiritual journey of a young man who seeks enlightenment through experience rather than doctrine. Siddhartha is the handsome, gifted son of a Brahmin, admired by all and loved by his friend Govinda.
This volume, published in New York in 1922 as Three Plays, brought Pirandello's theatre to English readers. It contains Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) and Henry IV (1922), both translated by Edward Storer, and Right You Are!
Mr. Utterson, a reserved and loyal London lawyer, takes his Sunday walk with his kinsman Richard Enfield, who points out a shabby door in a by-street and tells how, at three one winter morning, he saw a small man trample a little girl and walk on. Caught and threatened, the man paid close to a hundred pounds in compensation with a cheque signed by a respected gentleman.
The Summa Theologiae, traditionally called the Summa Theologica, is Aquinas's unfinished synthesis of Christian theology, written, as its prologue says, for beginners who were confused by the disorder and repetition of existing textbooks. It contains some 512 questions divided into about 2,600 articles, each built on the same disciplined form inherited from university disputation.
The Aeneid tells how Aeneas, a Trojan survivor, travels from ruined Troy to Italy to found the lineage that will become Rome. The poem opens with storm and displacement: Juno hates the Trojans, Aeolus releases winds, and Aeneas reaches Carthage.
The Age of Alexander is a collection of nine of Plutarch's Lives covering the Greek world in the fourth and early third centuries BCE, from the decline of Sparta and Thebes through the rise of Macedon and the conquests of Alexander to the struggles of his successors. Removed from their original Roman pairings, they read as a sequence of Greek history told through character.
The Anatomy of Melancholy presents itself as a medical treatise, laid out in the scholastic manner of partitions, sections, members and subsections, on 'what it is, with all the kinds, causes, symptoms, prognostics, and several cures of it'. It is also an encyclopedia of Renaissance learning, a compendium of quotation from more than a thousand authors, a satire on human folly, and a consolation for its author and readers.
The Annals of Imperial Rome narrates the Julio-Claudian empire from the death of Augustus through Tiberius, Claudius and Nero, though parts are lost. Tacitus writes history as the psychology of autocracy.
The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini is the life story of a Florentine goldsmith and sculptor, dictated in his late fifties and carried from his birth on All Saints' night in 1500 to 1562. It opens with Cellini's claim that anyone who has done excellent work and is honest should write his own life after forty, and with his ancestry and childhood: his father Giovanni, a musician and maker of instruments, wants him to be a flute-player, and once boxes his ears so that he will remember the salamander they have seen in the fire.
The Brothers Karamazov centers on the murder of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, a sensual, neglectful father whose sons embody conflicting responses to desire, faith, reason, and guilt. Dmitri is passionate, impulsive, indebted, and publicly at war with his father over inheritance and Grushenka.
The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories is a selection of Lovecraft's tales, edited with notes by the Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi, tracing his development from early Poe-influenced pieces to the 'cosmic horror' for which he is known. Lovecraft's central idea is that humanity is an insignificant accident in a vast, indifferent universe, and that knowledge of this truth is enough to destroy sanity.
Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Civili, in three books, narrate the first two years of the war he fought against Pompey and the senatorial party, from January 49 BCE to the beginning of the Alexandrian war in late 48. The work is unfinished, breaking off in Alexandria, and it is the most openly political of his writings: its constant task is to show that Caesar was forced into war by a faction of personal enemies, that he repeatedly sought peace, and that he treated defeated fellow citizens with a mercy his opponents never showed.
The Count of Monte Cristo is a vast novel of injustice and revenge. In 1815 Edmond Dantès, a young sailor of Marseilles, returns from a voyage on which he carried a letter from Napoleon's island of Elba as a dying captain requested.
Book I of The Faerie Queene, the Legend of the Knight of the Red Cross, or of Holiness, tells how a young, untried knight wins his spurs by freeing a kingdom from a dragon and, on the way, learns how easily a Christian soul is deceived. Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, has sent the Redcrosse Knight, who bears a bloody cross on breast and shield, to help the lady Una, whose royal parents are besieged in their brazen castle by a monstrous dragon.
The Fall is a short novel in six chapters made up entirely of the monologue of Jean-Baptiste Clamence, a Frenchman living in Amsterdam, who over five days talks to a stranger he meets at a sailors' bar called Mexico City. The listener never speaks in the text; his replies are implied by Clamence's answers.
The Great Gatsby is narrated by Nick Carraway, a young Midwesterner and war veteran who comes East in the spring of 1922 to learn the bond business and rents a small house in West Egg, on Long Island, beside the vast mansion of the mysterious Jay Gatsby. Across the bay in fashionable East Egg live Nick's cousin Daisy Buchanan and her husband Tom, a rich former Yale football player, along with Daisy's friend Jordan Baker, a champion golfer.
The Histories is Tacitus's narrative of the Roman Empire from 1 January AD 69 onward. It originally ran to Domitian's death in 96, but only Books I-IV and the first part of Book V survive, covering about eighteen months.
Books I-V are the first pentad of Livy's vast history of Rome from its foundation, carrying the story from the arrival of Aeneas in Italy to the recovery of the city after the Gallic sack of about 390 BC. Livy opens with a preface that admits the earliest traditions are closer to poetry than to record, and then states his purpose: history sets before the reader examples of every kind of conduct, to be imitated or avoided, and Rome, he believes, was richer in good examples than any other state until luxury and avarice came late.
The Horse and His Boy takes place during the golden age of Narnia, while the four Pevensie children reign at Cair Paravel, and it happens mostly in Calormen, the hot, crowded empire far to the south. Shasta, a boy of about eleven, lives in a fishing village with Arsheesh, a hard man who works him like a servant.
The Idiot tells what happens when a man of complete goodness and simplicity enters the money-driven society of St. Petersburg in the late 1860s. Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, the last of an old noble family, returns to Russia after four years in a Swiss sanatorium, where Dr. Schneider treated him for the epileptic illness that left him so slow as a child that people called him an idiot.
The Innocence of Father Brown collects the first twelve stories about Father Brown, a short, round-faced Roman Catholic priest from Essex with a shabby umbrella and an armful of brown-paper parcels, who solves crimes by understanding the sinners who commit them. In "The Blue Cross" Aristide Valentin, head of the Paris police, lands at Harwich hunting the giant French thief Flambeau and follows a trail of absurdities across London: salt in a sugar bowl, soup thrown at a wall, a window broken and paid for in advance, price labels swapped on a fruit stall.
The Jewish War is Josephus' account of the revolt against Rome from its Hasmonean and Herodian prehistory to the destruction of Jerusalem and the last pockets of resistance. Written after Josephus had defected to the Romans, the work tries to explain a catastrophe to several audiences at once: Jews who had survived it, Romans who had conquered, and Greek-speaking readers who needed Judean politics translated into the language of civil war, faction and providence.
The Koran, or Quran ('recitation'), is the central scripture of Islam. It consists of 114 chapters called suras, of very unequal length, each made up of verses (ayat).
The Last Days of Socrates gathers four dialogues by Plato that together tell the story of Socrates' trial and death in Athens in 399 BCE: the Euthyphro, the Apology, the Crito and the Phaedo. In the Euthyphro, Socrates meets Euthyphro outside the court where Socrates must answer an indictment for impiety and corrupting the young.
The Meek One (Krotkaya), also translated as A Gentle Creature, is a long short story that Dostoevsky published in his one-man journal A Writer's Diary in November 1876, prompted by newspaper reports of suicides, including that of a young seamstress who leapt from a window holding an icon. In a short preface Dostoevsky calls it a 'fantastic' story, explaining that it is realistic in every respect except its form: it imagines the inner monologue of a man as though a stenographer could record his chaotic thoughts.
The Moonstone, subtitled A Romance, tells the story of a great yellow diamond taken from India and the year of suspicion that follows its disappearance from an English country house. A Prologue, drawn from a family paper, describes the storming of Seringapatam in 1799, when the officer John Herncastle seizes the jewel from Tipu Sultan's treasury, killing its guardians; one dying Indian warns that the Moonstone will have its vengeance.
The Oresteia follows the House of Atreus from inherited blood guilt to the foundation of civic justice. Agamemnon opens at Argos, where a watchman sees the beacon announcing Troy’s fall.
The Picture of Dorian Gray is Oscar Wilde's only novel, a moral fable told in the polished language of the London drawing room. In the studio of the painter Basil Hallward, the witty Lord Henry Wotton sees an unfinished portrait of an extraordinarily handsome young man and insists on meeting its subject.
The Plague is a chronicle of an epidemic of bubonic and then pneumonic plague in Oran, a commercial port on the Algerian coast, in an unspecified year of the 1940s. The narrator, who reveals himself only at the end as the physician Bernard Rieux, writes as an impartial witness, drawing also on the notebooks of his friend Jean Tarrou.
The Portable Dorothy Parker collects poems, stories, sketches, reviews and occasional pieces that display Parker's distinctive mixture of speed, polish, cruelty and pain. The volume is not a single narrative but a portable career: the brittle lyrics of disappointed love, the dramatic monologues of women waiting for calls or managing humiliation, the social comedies of parties and hotel rooms, the criticism that makes taste sound conversational, and the political pieces that reveal moral seriousness beneath the pose of urban detachment.
The Portable Faulkner is not a single work in the usual sense but an edited map of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fiction. Malcolm Cowley arranged stories, novel excerpts, genealogical material and commentary so that readers could see Faulkner's invented county as one continuous historical field.
The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening was published in Copenhagen on 30 July 1849 under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, with Kierkegaard named as editor. Its title comes from Jesus' words about Lazarus in John 11:4, 'This sickness is not unto death.' The introduction argues that for the Christian even death is not the sickness unto death, since there is hope beyond it; the true sickness unto death is despair, a condition in which one cannot die and cannot live, a perpetual dying without end.
Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws (De l'esprit des lois), published anonymously at Geneva in 1748 after many years of reading and travel, asks why the laws of different peoples differ and what makes them fit or unfit for those who live under them. His answer is that laws are relations: they must suit the form of government and also the climate and soil, the religion, commerce, manners and size of a nation.
The Theban Plays collects Sophocles’ tragedies about Oedipus and his children: Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone. They were not written as a trilogy, but together they form the most influential family disaster in Western drama.
Olivia Coolidge's The Trojan War retells the whole legend of Troy, from its cause in heaven to the homecomings of the Greek kings, in 33 short chapters that can each be read as a story on its own. It begins with the golden apple thrown among the goddesses, the judgment of Paris, and the beauty of Helen, whom Paris carries off from her husband Menelaus of Sparta.
This volume gathers three Euripides plays about what the Trojan War left behind: The Trojan Women and Iphigenia in Tauris in Gilbert Murray's rhyming verse, and Hecuba in Michael Wodhull's blank verse of 1782. The Trojan Women opens on the smoking ruins of Troy.
The Waves follows six speaking consciousnesses from childhood to old age: Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny and Louis. A seventh figure, Percival, never speaks directly but becomes the focus of admiration, desire and grief.
The Wise Woman is George MacDonald's fairy-tale parable of two spoiled little girls in an odd country where everyone wants what he has not got. Princess Rosamond, whose name means Rose of the World, has been given everything she cried for, including a silver disc to stand in for the moon, and has grown into a raging, greedy child who beats her pets and has nearly killed her nurse.
Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, translated by Haldane and Kemp as The World as Will and Idea, is Arthur Schopenhauer's single, systematic statement of a philosophy that he claimed expressed one thought from four sides. It appeared in December 1818 (dated 1819) in four books with an appendix criticising Kant, and in 1844 he added a second volume of fifty supplementary chapters keyed to the first.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None is a philosophical prose-poem in four parts, written in the cadences of Luther's Bible. Its hero borrows the name of the ancient Persian prophet Zoroaster, whom Nietzsche chose because the first moralist should be the one to overturn morality.
Uncle Tom's Cabin follows two lines of story that begin on the Kentucky farm of Arthur Shelby, a kindly but indebted master who agrees to sell two slaves to the trader Haley: Uncle Tom, his faithful and devout manager, and Harry, the small son of Eliza, Mrs. Shelby's maid. Overhearing the bargain, Eliza flees north with Harry that night, and with the slave-catchers close behind she crosses the Ohio River by leaping from one floating cake of ice to another.
Uncle Vanya, subtitled Scenes from Country Life, takes place over a few months on a provincial Russian estate. For twenty-five years Ivan Petrovich Voitski, Uncle Vanya, has managed the property with his niece Sonia, sending its income to her father, Professor Alexander Serebrakoff, the widower of Vanya's sister, whom Vanya once revered as a great scholar.
Utilitarianism is a short defence of the ethical theory Mill inherited from Jeremy Bentham and his own father. It was first published in three instalments of Fraser's Magazine in 1861 and as a book in 1863.
Utopia is a dialogue in two books, written in Latin and presented as a true report. In Book I More, writing in his own person, recalls his embassy to Flanders in 1515 with Cuthbert Tunstall.
Waiting for Godot is a play in two acts by Samuel Beckett, written in French as En attendant Godot between late 1948 and early 1949, published by Les Éditions de Minuit in 1952, and first staged at the small Théâtre de Babylone in Paris on 5 January 1953, directed by Roger Blin. Beckett's own English translation, subtitled a tragicomedy in two acts, was published by Grove Press in New York in 1954.
Passages
- Alone in Berlin, Part I
Frau Rosenthal, hounded and robbed, falls to her death from a window.
- Alone in Berlin, Part IV
Interrogation and imprisonment of the Quangels; cyanide capsules offered as a means of choosing death.
- Alone in Berlin, Part IV
Inspector Escherich, broken by what he has done, shoots himself.
- Beyond Good and Evil, Part Four, §§68, 154, 156, 157
Memory yielding to pride; health versus pathology of thought; collective insanity; the thought of suicide as consolation through bad nights.
- Cannery Row, Early chapter (Palace Flophouse)
Horace Abbeville settles his debt with Lee Chong and shoots himself in the building that becomes the Palace Flophouse.
- Carmilla, Chapters XV-XVI
Two medical men attest to breathing and heartbeat in the exhumed body; Vordenburg explains that a suicide may become a vampire and that the vampire's strength sustains itself on living blood.
- City of God, Book 1
Augustine consoles Christians after Rome’s sack and discusses captivity, rape, shame and suicide.
- Complete Poems, 'Résumé' (Enough Rope)
A catalogue of methods of suicide and their disadvantages, ending in reluctant survival.
- Crime and Punishment, Confession and exile
Crime and Punishment gives this tag concrete force through this is a major psychiatric novel: fever, delirium, obsession, dissociation, alcoholism, suicide, trauma, and moral injury drive the action
- David Copperfield, Ch. 47
David and Mr Peggotty find Martha by the river, on the brink of drowning herself.
- Death of a Salesman, Act One, Linda's speech to her sons
Linda reveals Willy's deliberate car crashes and the rubber hose she found by the gas pipe.
- Death of a Salesman, Act Two, the firing and Charley's office
Willy is fired after decades and remarks that he is worth more dead than alive.
- Death of a Salesman, Act Two, final scenes and Requiem
Willy plans his death for the insurance; the funeral and Linda's inability to cry.
- Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part 10
Philo on why the miserable remain alive: terrified, not bribed, to continue existing; the man of delicate temper as more sensitive and therefore more unhappy.
- East of Eden, Part Four
Kate, suffering from arthritis and fearing exposure, takes poison.
- Essays, Book II, Ch. III, 'A Custom of the Isle of Cea'
Survey of classical and biblical cases of voluntary death and the arguments for and against it, including unbearable pain as a justification.
- Essays and Aphorisms, Parerga II, 'On Suicide' (in the Hollingdale selection)
Rejection of religious and legal condemnation of suicide, mockery of clerical arguments, and the metaphysical claim that suicide fails to deny the will.
- Ethics, Part IV, Prop. XX, Note
No one refuses food or kills himself from the necessity of his own nature; Seneca's forced suicide and hidden external causes are discussed.
- Fahrenheit 451, Part One, the night Montag meets Clarisse
Montag finds Mildred unconscious beside an empty bottle of sleeping tablets; the technicians pump her stomach and replace her blood by machine.
- Fahrenheit 451, Part One, the next morning
Mildred, hungry and cheerful, remembers nothing and denies she would have taken so many pills.
- Fahrenheit 451, Part One, the old woman's house
The woman refuses to leave her books and dies in the fire she lights herself.
- Faust, Part One, Scene I, Night
Faust despairs of his learning and lifts a cup of poison to drink at dawn before the Easter bells stop him.
- Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, First Section (examples of acting from duty)
The person who preserves life without loving it after hopeless sorrow, and the philanthropist whose own grief has extinguished sympathy.
- Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Second Section (first example under the universal law of nature)
A man wearied of life asks whether suicide from self-love could be a universal law and concludes it could not.
- Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Second Section (formula of humanity, duties to oneself)
One may not mutilate, damage or kill oneself; Kant defers the question of amputating limbs to preserve life to a future ethics.
- Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 2
Hamlet's first soliloquy wishes his flesh would melt and regrets the divine law against self-slaughter.
- Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
The 'To be, or not to be' soliloquy weighs death, sleep and the dreams that may come after.
- Hamlet, Act 4, Scene 7 and Act 5, Scene 1
Gertrude reports Ophelia's drowning; the gravediggers and the priest dispute whether she died by her own act and deserves Christian burial.
- Heroides, Letter VII (Dido to Aeneas)
Dido, sleepless and consumed by love, prepares the pyre and writes her own epitaph.
- Heroides, Letter XV (Sappho to Phaon)
Sappho describes weeping, sleeplessness and dreams of Phaon, and is told of the leap from the Leucadian rock as a cure for love.
- Iphigenia in Aulis and Other Plays, Heracles, final scene
Heracles wakes bound to a pillar, learns what he has done, contemplates suicide, and is persuaded by Theseus to live.
- Iphigenia in Aulis and Other Plays, The Suppliants, Evadne scene
Evadne throws herself onto the pyre of Capaneus before her father Iphis.
- Jude the Obscure, Part Sixth, Ch. II
The deaths of the three children at the Christminster lodgings, the boy's note, and the Doctor's theory of children who wish not to live.
- Julius Caesar, Act 4, Scene 3
Brutus reports that Portia, distracted by grief and fear, swallowed fire; Caesar's ghost then appears to him at night.
- Julius Caesar, Act 5, Scenes 3 and 5
Cassius has Pindarus kill him, Titinius kills himself, and Brutus runs on his sword.
- Kalevala, Runes IV and XXXV-XXXVI
Aino drowns herself and her mother laments; Kullervo's sister drowns herself and Kullervo falls on his sword.
- Kokoro, Part Two
News of the Meiji emperor's death and General Nogi's suicide reaches the household.
- Kokoro, Part Three
K's suicide in his room and Sensei's discovery of the body and the note.
- Kokoro, Part Three (end)
Sensei's account of his long guilt and his resolve to die.
- Letters from a Stoic, Letters 70 and 77
Suicide and voluntary death are discussed as questions of freedom, endurance and circumstance.
- Leviathan, Part I, Ch. VIII
Madness as excessive passion; rage and melancholy; the man in Bedlam who claims to be God the Father; drunkenness; the Abdera fever epidemic and the hanging maidens of a Greek city.
- Lex, Rex, Question XIX
Rutherford likens swearing to give up self-preservation to swearing to self-murder, citing natural law's command to preserve one's own life.
- Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, Life of Cato the Younger, end
Cato’s death at Utica, including his tearing open the wound the physician had dressed.
- Lord Jim, Ch. 6
Captain Brierly, an assessor at the inquiry, jumps overboard soon after it ends, leaving careful arrangements.
- Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5 and 5, Scene 9 (Folio 5.7)
Lady Macbeth's death, later said to be by her own hand.
- Man's Search for Meaning, Part One, second phase
Frankl's talk to his hut on the fasting day, and his work with two men who had spoken of suicide, each reminded of a child or a scientific work waiting for him.
- Medea and Other Plays, Heracles, madness episode
In a related Euripidean tragedy, Heracles kills his family under divinely imposed madness and awakens to horror.
- Mental Maladies, Lypemania and monomania
The diagnostic chapters track partial delusions, fixed ideas, fear, sorrow, and suicidal danger under now-historical labels.
- Moby-Dick, Chapter 1
Ishmael's hypos and his going to sea as a substitute for pistol and ball.
- Mourning Becomes Electra, The Hunted, Act Five
Christine shoots herself in Ezra's study after learning of Brant's death.
- Mourning Becomes Electra, The Haunted, Acts Two and Three
Orin's guilt-ridden manuscript, his obsessive possessiveness toward Lavinia and his suicide.
- Mrs. Dalloway, Late afternoon, the Bloomsbury lodging
A calm hour over Mrs. Peters's hat, then Holmes on the stairs and Septimus's leap from the window; the ambulance that Peter hears in the street.
- Mrs. Dalloway, Evening, the party
Clarissa's meditation in the little room on the young man's death, on defiance and communication, and her return to her guests.
- My Ántonia, Book I (c. Ch. 14–16)
Mr Shimerda shoots himself in the barn; the inquest, the debate over burial and the crossroads grave.
- My Ántonia, Book II
Ántonia tells of a tramp who jumped into a threshing machine.
- No Exit and Three Other Plays, No Exit
Estelle's confession of the birth of her child in Switzerland, its drowning from a balcony, and her lover's suicide.
- No Exit and Three Other Plays, No Exit
Inez's account of how her cousin's wife turned on the gas in their room at night.
- Orthodoxy, Chapter V, The Flag of the World
Suicide contrasted with martyrdom as the refusal of loyalty to existence.
- Othello, Act 5, Scene 2
Desdemona is smothered and briefly revives; Gratiano reports that grief killed Brabantio; Othello stabs himself.
- Persian Letters, Letter 76 (numbering varies by edition)
Usbek argues that laws against suicide are unjust, since a man oppressed by misery should be free to leave a society that no longer benefits him.
- Persian Letters, Final letter (Letter 161 in the 1758 numbering)
Roxane writes to Usbek after taking poison, declaring her deception and her inner freedom.
- Philosophy of Right, §70 and Addition
Hegel denies a right to suicide and discusses the cases of Hercules and Brutus.
- Romeo and Juliet, Act 5, Scene 1
Romeo seeks out the starving apothecary and buys a fast-acting poison against Mantua's law.
- Romeo and Juliet, Act 5, Scene 3
Romeo poisons himself and Juliet stabs herself; Montague reports that his wife has died of grief.
- Ruth, Ch. 8
Abandoned, Ruth runs toward a pool to drown herself and is stopped by Benson.
- Saint Joan, Preface, Was Joan Suicidal?
The Beaurevoir leap and the charge of a suicidal tendency, answered by comparison with soldiers' daring.
- Sanshirō, Early chapters (night at Nonomiya's house)
Sanshirō hears a voice near the railway line and then sees the body of a young woman struck by a train.
- Second Treatise of Government, Ch. II, §6
The law of nature forbids harming anyone in life, health, liberty or possessions; no one has liberty to destroy himself.
- Selected Short Stories, 'The Horla', final entries
He sets fire to his house to destroy the Horla and resolves that he must kill himself.
- Siddhartha: An Indian Tale, Part Two, 'By the River'
Contemplating drowning, Siddhartha hears Om, falls into a long sleep and wakes renewed.
- Six Characters in Search of an Author and Other Plays, Six Characters in Search of an Author, Act III
The Child's drowning in the garden fountain and the Boy's death by a revolver shot.
- Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Last Night
Poole reports the repeated notes sent to wholesale chemists demanding a purer sample of a drug, and the men find Hyde dead amid the smell of kernels.
- Summa Theologica, II-II, Q. 64, Art. 5 (not in stored text)
Whether it is lawful to kill oneself: Aquinas's three arguments from natural self-love, the community and God's dominion over life.
- The Aeneid, Book 4
Dido’s passion, abandonment, curse and suicide dominate the Carthage episode.
- The Age of Alexander: Nine Greek Lives, Life of Demosthenes 29–30
Demosthenes takes poison concealed in his pen to avoid capture by Macedonian agents.
- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part. 1, Sect. 4, Memb. 1
Prognostics of melancholy, including Burton's discussion of suicide among melancholics and the question of how such deaths should be judged.
- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part. 3, Sect. 4, Memb. 2, Subs. 2–6
Religious despair: definitions, causes in the devil, melancholy and terrifying preaching, symptoms of fear and anxiety, prognosis toward violent death, and cure by physic and good counsel.
- The Annals of Imperial Rome, Book 15, Seneca’s death
Seneca’s forced suicide is narrated as philosophical performance and political coercion.
- The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, Book I, Chapters CXVIII-CXXII
Despair in the dark dungeon, an attempt at self-destruction stopped by an unseen force, and the vision of the sun.
- The Brothers Karamazov, Murder and trial
The Brothers Karamazov gives this tag concrete force through its medical material includes epilepsy, hysteria, alcoholism, trauma, patricidal obsession, suicidal despair, and the contagious psychology of families
- The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, 'Dagon'
Narrator's morphine dependence, terror and suicidal resolve after his vision of the sea creature.
- The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, 'Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family'
A family history of madness and 'taint' culminating in Arthur Jermyn's self-immolation.
- The Civil War, Book II.41–42
Curio's exhausted and wounded men cannot break out; Curio refuses flight and fights until killed.
- The Count of Monte Cristo, Château d'If chapters (before 'Number 34 and Number 27')
Dantès, despairing in solitary confinement, resolves to die by refusing food.
- The Count of Monte Cristo, Final chapters
Madame de Villefort poisons herself and her son; Villefort loses his reason.
- The Faerie Queene, Book I, Book I, Canto IX, stanzas 28-54
Trevisan's flight, the cave of Despair, the argument for suicide, and Una's rescue of the knight as he raises the knife.
- The Fall, Chapter 4
Clamence hears a young woman fall from the Pont Royal into the Seine at night and walks on.
- The Great Gatsby, Chapter VIII
Wilson's night of grief with Michaelis, his fixation on the billboard eyes as the eyes of God, and the murder of Gatsby and Wilson's suicide.
- The Histories, Book II, ch. 46-49
Otho refuses to prolong the war, consoles his nephew, sleeps, and kills himself at dawn; some soldiers die by their own hand at his pyre.
- The History of Rome, Books I-V, Book I, ch. 58
Lucretia distinguishes the violated body from the guiltless mind and kills herself before her kin.
- The Horse and His Boy, Chapter 3
Aravis tells how she meant to kill herself rather than marry Ahoshta, until Hwin spoke.
- The Idiot, Part III, Chapters V-VII
Ippolit, dying of consumption, reads his written explanation and attempts suicide with a pistol that has no cap.
- The Innocence of Father Brown, The Three Tools of Death, Brown's explanation
A teetotal philanthropist relapses into drink and tries to kill himself; the rope, knife and pistol were used to restrain him.
- The Innocence of Father Brown, The Secret Garden, last paragraph
Valentin is found dead at his desk with a small box of pills beside him.
- The Jewish War, Book 3, siege of Jotapata
Roman siege engines, wounds, exhaustion, fear and Josephus' survival after a collective death pact make the campaign a study in injury and combat psychology.
- The Jewish War, Book 7, Masada
The Masada episode presents collective suicide as a response to enslavement and defeat, requiring careful historical and ethical reading.
- The Koran, Sura 4:29
Command not to kill yourselves (or each other), interpreted as forbidding suicide.
- The Last Days of Socrates, Phaedo 60e–62c
Socrates' recurring dream telling him to make music, and his argument that suicide is wrong until the god sends necessity.
- The Meek One, Part Two, Ch. 3–4
Her jump from the window holding an icon, Lukerya's account, and the narrator's anguish over the body.
- The Moonstone, First Period, Chapters XVIII–XIX
Rosanna Spearman is found to be missing, and Cuff and Betteredge follow her footsteps to the edge of the Shivering Sand, where they end.
- The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter VIII
Lord Henry reports Sibyl's death at the theater from a swallowed substance he supposes was prussic acid or white lead, and the inquest that will follow.
- The Plague, Part I and Part V
Cottard's attempted hanging at the start of the epidemic and his breakdown and arrest when it ends.
- The Portable Dorothy Parker, Big Blonde
Hazel Morse's party persona, drinking, depressive decline and suicide attempt make the story central for alcoholism and gendered despair.
- The Portable Dorothy Parker, Selected poems on suicide and heartbreak
Several short lyrics use comic form to stage suicidal thought, romantic despair and the social performance of toughness.
- The Portable Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury selections
Benjy's sensory narrative, Caddy's absence and Quentin's breakdown foreground disability, grief, time disturbance and suicidal despair.
- The Sickness Unto Death, Part One, A
Despair as a sickness one cannot die of: the torment of wishing to die and being unable to, of the self wanting to be rid of itself.
- The Sickness Unto Death, Part One, C (despair of weakness and of defiance)
Despair over the earthly and over oneself, inclosing reserve that hides despair from others, the risk of suicide in the inclosed person, and demonic defiance.
- The Spirit of the Laws, Book XIV, ch. 12
Roman and English suicide compared; the English case attributed to a distemper of the body rather than to education.
- The Theban Plays, Oedipus the King, recognition
Jocasta dies by hanging and Oedipus blinds himself after discovering his birth and crimes.
- The Theban Plays, Antigone, final messenger speech
Antigone, Haemon and Eurydice die by suicide after Creon’s delayed repentance.
- The Trojan War, Chapter 21, The armor of Achilles
Ajax and Odysseus contend for the dead hero's armor; in the tradition Ajax's defeat ends in madness and suicide.
- The Trojan Women and Other Plays, The Trojan Women, Andromache scene
Andromache argues that death is mere not-being and better than a life of grief; Hecuba replies that life always holds hope.
- The Trojan Women and Other Plays, The Trojan Women, final scene
Hecuba tries to rush into the burning city and is restrained by the soldiers before she is led to the ships.
- The Waves, Rhoda's soliloquies
Rhoda repeatedly experiences terror, unreality and separation from ordinary social identity.
- The Wise Woman (A Double Story), Chapter I
Rosamond's rages, the fit after she loses her silver moon, and the narrator's note that she had nearly killed her nurse and all but hanged herself.
- The World as Will and Representation, Fourth Book, §§68–69
Asceticism, fasting and self-mortification; suicide as affirmation of the will; voluntary starvation by ascetics, with cases reported in contemporary sources.
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part I, Discourse XXI: Voluntary Death
Praise of dying 'at the right time' and scorn for lingering decline; important for the history of arguments about suicide and end-of-life choice.
- Uncle Tom's Cabin, Chapter XX; Chapter XXXIV
St. Clare's comparison of cruelty to laudanum; Cassy's account of giving her baby laudanum.
- Uncle Tom's Cabin, Chapter XII; Chapter XVIII
Lucy drowns herself from Haley's boat after her child is sold; old Prue drinks to forget the child she lost.
- Uncle Vanya, Act IV
Astroff demands the return of the morphine Vanya has taken from his medicine case, and Sonia persuades her uncle to give it back.
- Utilitarianism, Chapter II (whether happiness is attainable)
Tranquillity and excitement as the two constituents of a satisfied life; the 'need of excitement' as a disease; selfishness and lack of mental cultivation as the main causes of an unsatisfying life; a passing reference to Novalis's recommendation of suicide.
- Utopia, Book II, Of Their Slaves, and of Their Marriages
Care of the incurable, counselled voluntary death by fasting or opium, refusal of honours to unsanctioned suicide, and old age called a disease of itself.
- Waiting for Godot, Act I and Act II, by the tree
The friends discuss hanging themselves and, at the end of Act II, test Estragon's belt, which breaks.
Quotes
“The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets successfully through many a bad night”
“You might as well live.”
“We are terrified, not bribed to the continuance of our existence”
“if adversity and hopeless sorrow have completely taken away the relish for life; if the unfortunate one, strong in mind, indignant at his fate rather than desponding or dejected, wishes for death, and yet preserves his life without loving it- not from inclination or fear, but from duty- then his maxim has a moral worth”
“A man reduced to despair by a series of misfortunes feels wearied of life, but is still so far in possession of his reason that he can ask himself whether it would not be contrary to his duty to himself to take his own life”
Frequently cited
“O that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew”
Frequently cited
“To be, or not to be, that is the question”
“They seem to see all its terrors before they are old enough to have staying power to resist them.”
“Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone.”
“Not only is suicide a sin, it is the sin.”
Frequently cited
“Of one that loved not wisely, but too well;”
Frequently cited
“Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die.”
“But though this be a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of licence”
Frequently cited
“Pretence? Reality, sir, reality!”
“observe this short precept, give not way to solitariness and idleness. Be not solitary, be not idle”
“Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived”
Frequently cited
“What is best of all is for ever beyond your reach: not to be born, not to _be_, to be _nothing._ The second best for you, however, is soon to die”
“I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more.”
“But Curio declared that he would never more appear in Caesar's sight, after losing the army which had been committed by Caesar to his charge, and accordingly fought till he was killed”
“To be unable to bear privation for a short time is disgraceful cowardice, not true valour. Those who voluntarily offer themselves to death are more easily found than those who would calmly endure distress”
Frequently cited
“Is not short paine well borne, that brings long ease, And layes the soule to sleepe in quiet grave? Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas, Ease after warre, death after life does greatly please.”
“But the body only has been violated, the mind is guiltless; death shall be my witness.”
“Even the most murderous blunders don’t poison life like sins”
“Death cannot be what Life is, Child; the cup Of Death is empty, and Life hath always hope.”
“Far from being denial of the will, suicide is a phenomenon of strong assertion of will”
“It is starvation, voluntarily chosen on the ground of extreme asceticism”
“Die at the right time: so teacheth Zarathustra”