“If Sally had been in an accident or come down with some overtly physical disease, I would not hesitate to tell him about it, confident that his sympathies would flow in my direction as a matter of course. But psychosis defies empathy; few people who have not experienced it up close buy the idea of a behavioral disease. It has the ring of an excuse, a license for self-absorption on the most extreme scale. It suggests that one chooses madness and not the other way around. (86)”

“It's something of a sacrilege nowadays to speak of insanity as anything but the chemical brain disease that on one level it is. But there were moments with my daughter when I had the distressed sense of being in the presence of a rare force of nature, such as a great blizzard or flood: destructive, but in its way astounding too. (4)”

“She is determined to learn to anticipate her worst bouts of psychosis, and head them off before they overwhelm her. "I'm trying to recognize when it's coming on," she says, "so I can get out of the way or at least drop to the ground like you would when caught in the crossfire of a shootout." (233)”

“For a long time I've wanted to apologize for my behavior that year, but I'm not sure how or even if it would be sincere. How does the man (woman) apologize for the boy (girl)? (132)”

“She thinks that if she gives it up, she'll lose the great abilities she believes she's acquired. It's a terrible paradox really: the mind falls in love with psychosis. The evil seduction, I call it. (186)”

“Eugen Bleuler (who in 1911 coined the word 'schizophrenia') once said that in the end his patients were stranger to him than the birds in his garden. But if they're strangers to us, what are we to them? (26)”

“Returning to the apartment, I feel a bitter tipsy pleasure at the extent to which my world has fallen apart.”