Was everybody seeing this stuff and acting as though they weren't? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?

Being crasy doesn't mean to be broken...It is you and me amplified", Girl, Interrupted

We say that Columbus discovered America and Newton discovered gravity, as though America and gravity weren't there until Columbus and Newton got wind of them.

Actually, it was only part of myself I wanted to kill: the part that wanted to kill herself, that dragged me into the suicide debate and made every window, kitchen implement, and subway station a rehearsal for tragedy.

This time I read the title of the painting: Girl Interrupted at Her Music. Interrupted at her music: as my life had been, interrupted in the music of being seventeen, as her life had been, snatched and fixed on canvas: one moment made to stand still and to stand for all the other moments, whatever they would be or might have been. What life can recover from that?

Don't separate the mind from the body. Don't separate even character - you can't. Our unit of existence is a body, a physical, tangible, sensate entity with perceptions and reactions that express it and form it simultaneously. Disease is one of our languages. Doctors understand what disease has to say about itself. It's up to the person with the disease to understand what the disease has to say to her.

But when they were done, I wondered if there would be a next time. I felt good. I wasn’t dead, yet something was dead. Perhaps I’d managed my peculiar objective of partial suicide. I was lighter, airier than I’d been in years.