suicide is the ultimate 'one-up,' as it were, the accusation that brooks no defense, the argument won at last.

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

Worrying is one of my few forms of prayer.

Money in the hand is real - coins and bills. The rest I don't believe in, and I don't think I ever did, really. What's a check, after all, but a promise - mine, the bank's. Me, I know, but the bank?

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

all children blackmail their parents with their innocence.

...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.