And if I fight, then for what?""For nothing easy or sweet, and I told you that last year and the year before that. For your own challenge, for your own mistakes and the punishment for them, for your own definition of love and of sanity - a good strong self with which to begin to live.

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 once had a patient who used to practice the most horrible tortures on himself, and when I asked him why he did such things, he said, 'Why before the world does them.' I asked him then, 'Why not wait and see what the world will do?' and he said, 'Don't you see? It always come at last, but this way at least I am master of my own destruction.

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

The woman was sane; she accepted the heavy penalties of reality and enjoyed its gifts also.

...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.

What do you do with mother love and mother wit when the babies are grown and gone away?