Our hospital was famous and housed many great poets and singers. Did the hospital specialize in poets and singers or was it that poets and singers specialized in madness?

I am not a nurse escorting six lunatics to the ice cream parlor.

Confuse was the nurses' word for abuse.

Are you crazy? It's a common phrase, I know. But it means something particular to me: the tunnels, the security screens, the plastic forks, the shimmering, ever-shifting borderline that like all boundaries beckons and asks to be crossed. I do not want to cross it again.

Emptiness and boredom: what a complete understatement. What I felt was complete desolation. Desolation, despair and boredom.

My family had a lot of characteristics - achievements, ambitions, talents, expectations - that all seemed to be recessive in me.

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.