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

Measure the hate you feel now, and the shame. That quantity is your capacity also to love and to feel joy and to have compassion.

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.

...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 have found this to be true, that one sin begets a dozen others.

A humane and authentic book written by another voice from the trenches.

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