Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?
The world didn't stop because we weren't in it anymore.
Every window in Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.
I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't.
Our hospital was famous and housed many great poets and singers. Did the hospital specialize in poets and singers or was it that poets and singers specialized in madness?
Don't separate the mind from the body. Don't separate even character - you can't. Our unit of existence is a body, a physical, tangible, sensate entity with perceptions and reactions that express it and form it simultaneously. Disease is one of our languages. Doctors understand what disease has to say about itself. It's up to the person with the disease to understand what the disease has to say to her.
An observer can't tell if a person is silent and still because inner life has stalled or because inner life is transfixingly busy.
The debate was wearing me out. Once you've posed that question, it won't go away. I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't. Anything I thought or did was immediately drawn into the debate. Made a stupid remark--why not kill myself? Missed the bus--better put an end to it all. Even the good got in there. I liked that movie--maybe I shouldn't kill myself.
When I was supposed to be awake, I was asleep. When I was supposed to sleep, I was silent. When a pleasure offered itself to me, I avoided it.
It's one of the reasons I became a writer, to be able to smoke in peace.
In the parallel universe the laws of physics are suspended. What goes up does not necessarily come down, a body at rest does not tend to stay at rest and not every action can be counted on to provoke an equal and opposite reaction. Time, 'too, is different. It may run in circles, flow backward, skip about from now to then. The very arrangement of molecules is fluid: Tables can be clocks, faces, flowers.
... now I was safe, now I was really crazy, and nobody could take me out of there.
My family had a lot of characteristics - achievements, ambitions, talents, expectations - that all seemed to be recessive in me.
I noticed that some of my deadness was being replaced by an intense feeling about the Greek stories and the Bible stories. They were similar. There was something naked about these stories. Terrible things happened, and then some more terrible things.
Being crasy doesn't mean to be broken...It is you and me amplified", Girl, Interrupted
Mental illness seems to be a communication problem between interpreters one and two.
But when they were done, I wondered if there would be a next time. I felt good. I wasn’t dead, yet something was dead. Perhaps I’d managed my peculiar objective of partial suicide. I was lighter, airier than I’d been in years.
When you’re sad you need to hear your sorrow structured into sound.
With wild eyes that had seen freedom.
There is thought, and then there is thinking about thoughts, and they don't feel the same.
Emptiness and boredom: what a complete understatement. What I felt was complete desolation. Desolation, despair and boredom.
Was everybody seeing this stuff and acting as though they weren't? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?
This clarity made me able to behave normally, which posed some interesting questions. Was everybody seeing this stuff and acting as though they weren't? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act? If some people didn't see these things, what was the matter with them? Were they blind or something? These questions had me unsettled.
For nearly a century the psychoanalysts have been writing op-ed pieces about the workings of a country they've never traveled to, a place that, like China, has been off-limits. Suddenly, the country has opened its borders and is crawling with foreign correspondents, neurobiologists are filing ten stories a week, filled with new data. These two groups of writers, however, don't seem to read each other's work. That's because the analysts are writing about a country they call Mind and the neuroscientists are reporting from a country they call Brain.
We say that Columbus discovered America and Newton discovered gravity, as though America and gravity weren't there until Columbus and Newton got wind of them.
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