Self Immolation Quotes

You've been making a regular habit of flinging yourself in front of bullets," she remarked amiably. "It's really not a good custom. Curb this tendency to self-immolation. ~ Kerry Greenwood

Self-immolation as a way to protest against the injustices or as a way to fight for freedom cannot be accepted! All the fights must be done in the dimension of existence! Your body is your road to everywhere; if you destroy it, you lose all the roads! Stay firm and fight alive; no cause is more valuable than a man's life! Keep your body out of the fire! Don't ever praise the self-immolations; condemn them! Suicide is a defeat! Power is to fight, to fight peacefully, and not to die in agony! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Here was an unparalleled thing, so that even from such an imperious and contemptuously proud girl as she was, such extremely frank testimony, such sacrifice, such self-immolation was almost impossible to expect. And for what, for whom? To save her betrayer and offender, at least somehow, at least slightly, to contribute to his salvation by creating a good impression in his favor! ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

What possesses them, these young girls with a talent for self-immolation? ~ Margaret Atwood

Stories about suicides resulted in an increase in single-car crashes where the victim was the driver. Stories about suicide-murders resulted in an increase in multiple-car crashes in which the victims included both drivers and passengers. Stories about young people committing suicide resulted in more traffic fatalities involving young people. Stories about older people committing suicide resulted in more traffic fatalities involving older people. These patterns have been demonstrated on many occasions. News coverage of a number of suicides by self-immolation in England in the late 1970's, for example, prompted 82 suicides by self-immolation over the next year. The "permission" given by an initial act of suicide, in other words, isn't a general invitation to the vulnerable. It is really a highly detailed set of instructions, specific to certain people in certain situations who choose to die in certain ways. It's not a gesture. It's speech. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

Merani
It runs; it flies; it bears me on; it heeds no trail nor spoor;
A raven black behind me croaks with ominous eyes of doom;
Speed thee on and onward fly with a gallop that knoweth no bound,
Fling to the winds my stormy thoughts in raging darkness found.

Go onward! onward! cleaving through roaring wind and rain
Over many a mount and many a plain, short'ning my days of pain;
Seek not shelter, my flying steed, from scorching skies or storm;
Pity not thy rider sad, by self-immolation worn.

I bid farewell to parents, kin, to friends and sweetheart dear
Whose gentle voice did soothe my hopes to a hot and bitter tear.
Where the night falls, there let it dawn, there let my country be;
Only the heavenly stars above my open heart will see.

The sighs that burn, that rend the heart to stormy waves I hurl;
To thy inspired, wild maddened flight, love's waning passions whirl.
Speed thee on, and onward fly, with a gallop that knoweth no bound,
Fling to the winds my stormy thoughts, in raging darkness found.

In foreign lands thou lay me low, not where my fathers sleep;
Nor shed thou tears nor grieve, my love, nor over my body weep;
Ravens grim will dig my grave and whirlwinds wind a shroud
There, on desert plains where winds will howl in wailings loud.

No lover's tears but dew divine will moist my bed of gloom;
No dirge but vultures' shrieks will sou ~ Nikoloz Baratashvili

The faded silhouette of Masada offered itself, its mute lines clear testimony for those who knew to read what was written there. A stark choice. Self-immolation or slavery. Freedom or life, but not both. ~ Rachel Kadish

What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can't be trusted - ? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster? ~ Donna Tartt

Self-sacrifice is one of a woman's seven deadly sins (along with self-abuse, self-loathing, self-deception, self-pity, self-serving, and self-immolation). ~ Sarah Ban Breathnach

What, exactly, she had been protesting was subject to interpretation. To the poorest, her self-immolation was a response to enervating poverty. To the disabled, it reflected the lack of respect accorded the physically impaired. To the unhappily married, who were legion, it was a brave indictment of oppressive unions. Almost no one spoke of envy, a stone slab, a poorly made wall, or rubble that had fallen into rice. ~ Katherine Boo

If that's the price of getting together , then I'll be damned if I want to live on the same earth with any human beings! If the rest of them can survive only by destroying us, then why should we wish them to survive? Nothing can make self-immolation proper. Nothing can give them the right to turn men into sacrificial animals. Nothing can make it moral to destroy the best. One can't be punished for being good. One can't be penalized for ability. If that is right, then we'd better start slaughtering one another, because there isn't any right at all in the world! ~ Ayn Rand

No woman is really humble; she is merely politic. No woman, with a free choice before her, chooses self-immolation; the most she genuinely desires in that direction is a spectacular martyrdom. No woman delights in poverty. No woman yields when she can prevail. No woman is honestly meek. ~ H.L. Mencken

As happens in dreams, when a perfectly harmless object inspires us with fear and thereafter is frightening every time we dream of it (and even in real life retains disquieting overtones), so Dreyer's presence became for Franz a refined torture, an implacable menace. [ ... H]e could not help cringing when, with a banging of doors in a dramatic draft, Martha and Dreyer entered simultaneously from two different rooms as if on a too harshly lit stage. Then he snapped to attention and in this attitude felt himself ascending through the ceiling, through the roof, into the black-brown sky, while, in reality, drained and empty, he was shaking hands with Martha, with Dreyer. He dropped back on his feet out of that dark nonexistence, from those unknown and rather silly heights, to land firmly in the middle of the room (safe, safe!) when hearty Dreyer described a circle with his index finger and jabbed him in the navel; Franz mimicked a gasp and giggled; and as usual Martha was coldly radiant. His fear did not pass but only subsided temporarily: one incautious glance, one eloquent smile, and all would be revealed, and a disaster beyond imagination would shatter his career. Thereafter whenever he entered this house, he imagined that the disaster had happened - that Martha had been found out, or had confessed everything in a fit of insanity or religious self-immolation to her husband; and the drawing room chandelier invariably met him with a sinister refulgence. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Whatever I endure in recovery, I need never again suffer the indignity of active addiction. The despair and hopelessness. The inexhaustible cycle of incremental self-immolation. I am reminded of how far I've come, of the miracle that, with help and humility, I can, one day at a time, live free from drugs and alcohol. ~ Russell Brand

I had not yet learned that one cannot really be superior without humility and tolerance and human understanding. I did not yet know that in order to belong to a rare and higher breed one must first develop the true power and talent of selfless immolation. ~ Thomas Wolfe

Yet even then the music has still a quality stern and implacable, deliberate and without passion so much as immolation, pleading, asking, for not love, not life, forbidding it to others, demanding in sonorous tones death as though death were the boon, like all Protestant music. ~ William Faulkner

All religions are cruel, all founded on blood; for all rest principally on the idea of sacrifice - that is, on the perpetual immolation of humanity to the insatiable vengeance of divinity. ~ Mikhail Bakunin

Call it a personal foible. Some people are scared of spiders. I'm scared of immolation. Also spiders. ~ Mark Lawrence

This is your last chance, Control. But it wasn't. It was, instead, an immolation. If he was remembered at all, it would be as the harbinger of disaster. ~ Jeff VanderMeer

[Pascal] was the first and perhaps is still the most effective voice to be raised in warning of the consequences of the enthronement of the human ego in contradistinction to the cross, symbolizing the ego's immolation. How beautiful it all seemed at the time of the Enlightenment, that man triumphant would bring to pass that earthly paradise whose groves of academe would ensure the realization forever of peace, plenty, and beatitude in practice. But what a nightmare of wars, famines, and folly was to result therefrom. ~ Malcolm Muggeridge

But in the end, back she comes. There's no use resisting. She goes to him for amnesia, for oblivion. She renders herself up, is blotted out; enters the darkness of her own body, forgets her name. Immolation is what she wants, however briefly. To exist without boundaries. ~ Margaret Atwood

Every hunchback has his gypsy, each phantom his diva, and flames of passion consume witches and martyrs alike. For any lonely monster, tradition demands that one sacrificial soul seek immolation.
Ashe to ashes.
It remains the ultimate, transformative act of love. ~ Robert Dunbar

This is why, as the Lord carried his cross, so Isaac himself carried to the place of sacrifice the wood on which he too was to be placed. Moreover, after the father had been prevented from striking his son, since it was not right that Isaac should be slain, who was the ram whose immolation completed the sacrifice by blood of symbolic significance? Bear in mind that when Abraham saw the ram it was caught by the horns in a thicket. Who, then, was symbolized by that ram but Jesus, crowned with Jewish thorns150 before he was offered in sacrifice? ~ Augustine Of Hippo

Throughout history the community of readers has been prey to sinister forces - to pedants and priests, legislators and lunatics, deities and demagogues. You have paid for your passion in humiliation, mutilation, and sometimes even - as when Henry VIII burned Bible translator William Tyndale as a heretic - immolation. I salute you all, as do my fellow books. ~ James K. Morrow

The archtraitor and madman Shuos Jedao had appeared as a Ninefox Crowned with Eyes, visionary and strategist, but had proved to be an Immolation Fox. ~ Yoon Ha Lee

The immolation occurred late on a Friday morning. The lunchtime bustle was picking up as Paul descended from his office building onto the crowded street. He cut an imposing figure against the flow of pedestrians: six feet four inches, broad shouldered, clean-shaven, clothed in the matching black coat, vest, and long tie that was to be expected of New York's young professional men. His hair, perfectly parted on the left, had just begun to recede into a gentle widow's peak. He looked older than his twenty-six years. As ~ Graham Moore

I don't know anyone who has described that terrible yearning for ecstasy and immolation through music as lucidly as Sean Madigan Hoen in Songs Only You Know. Only a thorough initiate of the scene who also had some genius with language could summon the demotic yet electric voice for the job. If there is ruefulness, now, for the way he treated his body, his girlfriends, and his family, he wisely reprises in his book, in neon detail, the fever that once placed him in the same drunken boat with Iggy Pop, Rimbaud and Artaud. ~ Jaimy Gordon

Jesus was not just a moralist whose teachings had some political implications; he was not primarily a teacher of spirituality whose public ministry unfortunately was seen in a political light; he was not just a sacrificial lamb preparing for his immolation, or a God-Man whose divine status calls us to disregard his humanity. Jesus was, in his divinely mandated (i.e., promised, anointed, messianic) prophethood, priesthood, and kingship, the bearer of a new possibility of human, social, and therefore political relationships. ~ John Howard Yoder