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

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?

...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.

The creative strength is good enough and deep enough to bring itself to flower and to grow in spite of this sickness.

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

If I want to die, what am I saving myself for?

all children blackmail their parents with their innocence.