I got better and Daisy didn't and I can't explain why. Maybe I was just flirting with madness the way I flirted with my teachers and my classmates. I wasn't convinced I was crazy, though I feared I wa...
All my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.
Imagined my character as a plate or shirt that had been manufactured incorrectly and was therefore useless.
What does borderline personality mean, anyhow? It appears to be a way station between neurosis and psychosis: a fractured but not disassembled psyche. Though to quote my post-Melvin psychiatrist: It's...
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 blin...
Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone.
My chronic feelings of emptiness and boredom came from the fact that I was living a life based on my incapacities, which were numerous.
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.
Have you ever confused a dream with life? Or stolen something when you have the cash? Have you ever been blue? Or thought your train moving while sitting still? Maybe I was just crazy. Maybe it was th...
They didn’t have time to wonder why I was a little more miserable than most.
The girl at her music sits in another sort of light,the fitful,overcast light of lie,by which we see ourselves and others only imprefectly, and seldom..-Girl,Interrupted
The floor of ice cream parlor bothered me. It was black-and-white checkboard tile, bigger than supermarket checkboard. If I looked only at a white square, I would be all right, but it was hard to igno...
Scar tissue has no character. It's not like skin. It doesn't show age or illness or pallor or tan. IT has no pores, no hair, no wrinkles. It's like a slipcover. It shields and disguises what's beneath...
People ask, How did you get in there? What they really want to know is if they are likely to end up in there as well. I can't answer the real question. All I can tell them is, It's easy.
If I who was previously revolting am now this far from my crazy self, how much further are you who were never revolting, and how much deeper your revulsion?
He would take refuge in a homey understanding of Faroese ways only to be slapped back to an uncomfortable position as an American by some terrible smell: uncomfortable because he could no more now ima...
For many of us, the hospital was as much a refuge as it was a prison. Though we were cut off from the world and all the trouble we enjoyed stirring up out there, we were also cut off from the demands...
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 a...
Can human beings love each other? Must we always love an image we've labored over secretly, never love the living soul with all its mire and murk?
Back then I didn't know that I -- or anyone-- could make a life out of boyfriends and literature. As far as I could see, life demanded skills I didn't have. The result was chronic emptiness and bo...