“After my first few tastes I was pretty much hooked. I'd have dry spells, months without any or only piddling amounts of grace, but I never forgot about it or stopped wanting it.”

“I was back to being polite, the well-tempered paranoid. I didn't have much of a choice. If I wasn't polite, they could stick me with those needles or put me back in that little room or take away my visitor privileges or any number of other things. Besides, there didn't seem to be any urgency or anything to be gained by not being polite, the way there had been before. So I was polite. There was time.”

“The way I played music there was the way I wanted to farm, chop wood, cook, make love, raise children. Everything. A lo of it had to do with things I felt while I played. If only I could feel that sense of total absorption in what I was doing when I was doing other things. It was more than absorption, it was spontaneity, competence, a sense of grace and playfulness, of being in touch with an inexhaustible source of energy and beauty.”

“If you take good care of any disease by eating well, sleeping well, being aware of your health, consciously wanting to be well, not smoking, et cetera, you are doing all the things you should be doing anyway, but somehow having a disease makes them easier to do. A human without a disease is like a ship without a rudder.”

“Today it’s nice to be able to entertain odd thoughts without having to marry them all. Thank God. I can think whatever the hell I want. Entertaining odd thoughts won’t make you crazy. Refusing to entertain odd thoughts won’t make you well.”

“The Doc. Virginia and Simon had told me that Dr. Dale was my doctor. I have a fuzzy recollection of walking up to some doctor-looking person and being totally absorbed by his gold tie clip. I suspected it was the button to end the world so I didn't touch it. I'm pretty sure it was Dr. Dale. I don't know who else would be so tasteless as to walk around a mental hospital wearing the button to end the world.”

“If nothing I say sparks any thoughts or identification, it’s possible you’re taking too much medication. If it’s the greatest talk you’ve ever heard, you’re not taking enough.”