I was too impatient to work at the usual duties assigned women on newspapers.

They were being driven to a prison, through no fault of their own, in all probability for life. In comparison, how much easier it would be to walk to the gallows than to this tomb of living horrors!

What a mysterious thing madness is. I have watched patients whose lips are forever sealed in a perpetual silence. They live, breathe, eat; the human form is there, but that something, which the body can live without, but which cannot exist without the body, was missing.

All the asylum clothing is made by the patients, but sewing does not employ one's mind. After several months' confinement the thoughts of the busy world grow faint, and all the poor prisoners can do is to sit and ponder over their hopeless fate

It is only after one is in trouble that one realizes how little sympathy and kindness there are in the world.

Never having failed, I could not picture what failure meant.

COULD I PASS A WEEK IN THE INSANE WARD AT BLACKWELL'S ISLAND? I SAID I COULD AND I WOULD. AND I DID.