“None of us are entirely well, and none of us are irrecoverably sick.”

“People with mental illness are very much like people without mental illness only more so. What we lose with a psychotic episode is the comforting assurance that we can’t lose our mind. When most people look down they see solid ground. When I look down, I’m not so sure.Crazy thoughts are not the problem. Everyone has crazy thoughts. Hallucinations and delusions tend to catch the attention but aren’t the problem. The problem is that the world becomes discontinuous. We can’t attend to the world and take care of ourselves. So others try to take care of us and they do an imperfect job of it. There is no substitute for being well.”

“He couldn't help thinking that all that money we were spending blowing up things and killing people so far away, making people the world over hate and fear us, would have been better spent on public education and libraries. It's hard to imagine that history won't prove him right, if it hasn't already.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Let us not be too particular. It is better to have old second-hand diamonds than none at all.”