“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“...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.”

“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.”