“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)”

“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)”

“I mention a paradox of psychiatry: mental illness is recognized by the patient's distorted thoughts, but treatment is largely indifferent to their content. (104)”

“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 now knew that the death she feared might not be a physical one, that it could be death of the will, the soul, the mind, the laws, and thus not death, but a perpetual dying.”

“I remember the tale of the rabbi to whom a dead man came with a problem: he believed that he was alive. "Don't you know," the rabbi told him, "that you are no longer among the living? You are in the Land of Confusion." On hearing the story, the rabbi's son worried that he too was in the Land of Confusion. "Once you know that there exists such a world, you cannot be in it," explained the father. (208)”