“Now, as I look back on my life, I can honestly say I wouldn't change it. The pain and suffering have brought me psychological understanding and spiritual strength. I still feel the pain when I reflect on those experiences, but while once they would throw me deeper and deeper into anxious despair, now they feed my desire to keep growing. (3)”

“Marie refuses to describe herself as "cured." She feels such a label ignores the process of getting and staying healthy. 'When I was released from Sutton State Hospital, I didn't come out 'well.' It was a process of getting well. In my first years out, I would sometimes have to sit rigidly by the door, stuck in my anxiety, disconnected from my feelings. I still had to learn that I couldn't demand love and attention - I have to learn to exchange feelings.' (xiii)”

“Thought I appear unaware of my surroundings, I hear her words. They're cruel and hurt me deeply...I know the state I'm in, but I also know that I didn't bring it on myself and I can't get out of it. (103)”

“Marie is a person whose life experiences, though different from most, have never robbed her of her humanity. At the very depth of her psychosis, she could touch her own wish for sanity even though this touch required every bit of her will to live. From a curled-up position of catatonic silence on her hospital bed, she could still see herself: 'I looked at myself and said, 'No more. I can't go on this way anymore...if I ever want to get out of here, if I ever want to get better" (xiii)”

“But it isn't that I'm just Pat. I'm both Pat and the person who knows that being Pat is itself a sign of my sickness. I never totally lose sight of that difference, though the degree to which I'm aware I've regressed varies, and there are times when I don't know a life outside of Pat's child world. (103)”

“Later on, I see how often therapists keep patients coming to them, not so much for the benefit of the patients but to satisfy the therapists' need to help - and because of their own inability to recognize the clients' actual independence. (148)”

“Now it is as if I remember my grief rather than experience it. I remember the pain I suffered as the memories washed over me where I sat on the deck that day. Now I have only the memories of my own feelings, not the feelings themselves. That day the feelings were still alive, the pain real. Now I look back and I can see every detail but I am not there, inside it. My own pain is now forever calcified. I carry it with me, but it is no longer alive. (10)”