To praise one thing is not to damn another.

A humane and authentic book written by another voice from the trenches.

All children blackmail their parents with their innocence.

She now knew that the death she feared might not be a physical one, that it could be death of the will, the soul, the mind, the laws, and thus not death, but a perpetual dying.

The horror of the Pit lay in the emergence from it, with the return of her will, her caring, and her feeling of the need for meaning before the return of meaning itself.

And if I fight, then for what?For nothing easy or sweet, and I told you that last year and the year before that. For your own challenge, for your own mistakes and the punishment for them, for your own definition of love and of sanity -- a good strong self with which to begin to live.

I'm sorry I'm young, Deborah answered with a bitterness that was half prose. We have a right to be as crazy as anyone else.

The horror of the Pit lay in the emergence from it, with the return of her will, her caring, and her feeling of the need for meaning before the return of the meaning itself.

Don't cut bangs with a hatchet. Don't do brain surgery with a pickax.

You know... the thing that is so wrong about being mentally ill is the terrible price you have to pay for survival.

A nut is someone whose noose broke.

Suicide is a crime -- the only crime that, if successful, guarantees that the perpetrator will not be punished for it. This makes it the most serious crime of all.

To experience the reality was to suffer a boredom as endless as the illness itself...the boredom of insanity was a great desert, so great that anyone's violence or agony seemed an oasis, and the brief companionship seemed like a rain in the desert that was numbered and counted and remembered long after it was gone.

Sometimes the world is so much sicker than the inmates of its institutions.

Suicide is the ultimate 'one-up,' as it were, the accusation that brooks no defense, the argument won at last.

There is nothing that you can do to me that my own craziness doesn't do to me smarter and faster and better.

If I want to die, what am I saving myself for?

The woman was sane; she accepted the heavy penalties of reality and enjoyed its gifts also.

The rose-garden world of perfection is a lie and a bore too!

What do you do with mother love and mother wit when the babies are grown and gone away?