Joanne Greenberg

“Seni övmek, böbürlenmek demektir. Deborah'ı övmekse... bağışlamak...”

“Bir şeyi övmek, bir başka şeyi kötülemek anlamına gelmez.”

“Oturma odasında kan görmekten herkes korkar, ‘Acı çeken birini görmeye dayanamıyorum,’ derler, ‘Onun için git, dışarıda öl!”

“Deborah’ın, insan maddesi taşısa bile, kendisiyle insan ırkının öteki üyeleri arasındaki mesafenin ne denli büyük geldiğini bu insanlara anlatması olanaksızdı.”

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

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

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

“At least being nuts is being somewhere.”

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

“A nut is someone whose noose broke.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Yr had a region called the Fear-bog. Lactamaeon had taken her there once to see the monsters and corpses of her nightmares accumulating there from year after year of terrifying dreams. They had swum through the almost solid ground.She had said, What is that awful stench?Shame and secrecy, Bird-one, shame and secrecy, he had answered.”

“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 rose-garden world of perfection is a lie... and a bore, too!”

“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.”

“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.”

“...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.”

“And what does that signify to you?" he said, perhaps forgetting that if she could speak truly to the world, she would not be a mental patient.”