Don't cut bangs with a hatchet. Don't do brain surgery with a pickax.

...to experience the reality was to suffer a boredom as endless as the illness itself...the boredom of insanity was a great desert, so great that anyone's violence or agony seemed an oasis, and the brief companionship seemed like a rain in the desert that was numbered and counted and remembered long after it was gone.

"I'm sorry I'm young," Deborah answered with a bitterness that was half prose. "We have a right to be as crazy as anyone else"

There is nothing that you can do to me that my own craziness doesn't do to me smarter and faster and better.

Sometimes the world is so much sicker than the inmates of its institutions.

What cook can match herself against hunger and memory?

The hidden strength is too deep a secret. But in the end...in the end it is our only ally.