“In the parallel universe the laws of physics are suspended.What goes up does not necessarily come down, a body at rest does not tend to stay atrest and not every action can be counted on to provoke an equal and opposite reaction.Time, 'too, is different. It may run in circles, flow backward, skip about from now tothen. The very arrangement of molecules is fluid: Tables can be clocks, faces,flowers.”

“Don't separate the mind from the body. Don't separate even character - you can't. Our unit of existence is a body, a physical, tangible, sensate entity with perceptions and reactions that express it and form it simultaneously.Disease is one of our languages. Doctors understand what disease has to say about itself. It's up to the person with the disease to understand what the disease has to say to her.”

“Lunatics are similar to designated hitters. Often an entire family is crazy, but since an entire family can't go into the hospital, one person is designated as crazy and goes inside. Then, depending on how the rest of the family is feeling that person is kept inside or snatched out, to prove something about the family's mental health.”

“Viscosity and velocity are opposites, yet they can look the same. Viscosity causes the stillness ofdisinclination, velocity causes the stillness of fascination. An observer can't tell if a person is silent andstill because inner life has stalled or because inner life is transfixingly busy.”

“For many of us, the hospital was as much a refuge as it was a prison. Though we were cut off from the world and all the trouble we enjoyed stirring up out there, we were also cut off from the demands and expectations that had driven us crazy. What could be expected of us now that we were stowed away in a loony bin?”

“Sometimes the only way to stay sane is to go a little crazy.”

“It's a long way from not having enough serotonin to thinking the world is "stale, flat and unprofitable"; even further to writing a play about a man driven by that thought. ”