Not everything has a happy ending, and not everything has an ending. Some things just kind of dribble away or cut off abruptly.

Disease [is] as 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.

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

The only way to stay sane is to go a little crazy.

I noticed that some of my deadness was being replaced by an intense feeling about the Greek stories and the Bible stories. They were similar. There was something naked about these stories. Terrible things happened, and then some more terrible things.

Every window in Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.

By the time we hit the streets they were silent and closed in on us, and they had assumed the Nonchalant Look, an expression that said, I am not a nurse escorting six lunatics to the ice cream parlor. But they were, and we were their six lunatics, so we behaved like lunatics.