Joanne Greenberg quotes:

The hidden strength is too deep a secret. But in the end...in the end it is our only ally.

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

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.

all children blackmail their parents with their innocence.

The people on the edge of Hell were most afraid of the devil; for those already in hell the devil was only another and no one in particular.

Anybody can hear - it takes brains to listen.

The creative strength is good enough and deep enough to bring itself to flower and to grow in spite of this sickness.

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".

Worrying is one of my few forms of prayer.

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

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

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

"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"

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 praise one thing is not to damn another.

A nut is someone whose noose broke.

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

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.

At least being nuts is being somewhere.

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

I have found this to be true, that one sin begets a dozen others.

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

Money in the hand is real - coins and bills. The rest I don't believe in, and I don't think I ever did, really. What's a check, after all, but a promise - mine, the bank's. Me, I know, but the bank?

...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.

What cook can match herself against hunger and memory?

Measure the hate you feel now, and the shame. That quantity is your capacity also to love and to feel joy and to have compassion.

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

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 second part was more a plea, and to her surprise the superbly inhuman fighter smiled softly and said, "Yes ... I suppose that's true, though I never thought of it in those terms before.

I once had a patient who used to practice the most horrible tortures on himself, and when I asked him why he did such things, he said, 'Why before the world does them.' I asked him then, 'Why not wait and see what the world will do?' and he said, 'Don't you see? It always come at last, but this way at least I am master of my own destruction.

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