Percy on Suicide

“The difference between a non-suicide and an ex-suicide leaving the house for work, at eight o'clock on an ordinary morning:

The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him from the past and being sucked toward care in the future. His breath is high in his chest.

The ex-suicide opens his front door, sits down on the steps, and laughs. Since he has the option of being dead, he has nothing to lose by being alive. It is good to be alive. He goes to work because he doesn't have to.”
― Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book

(When Percy was 13, his father committed suicide and two years later, his mother drove off a cliff. He and his brother were adopted by an uncle, but the legacy of suicide and depression in his family would haunt him for the rest of his life.
-Writer's Almanac)