Joanne Greenberg Quotes

Suicide is the ultimate 'one-up,' as it were, the accusation that brooks no defense, the argument won at last.

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.

Do you know why you're here?' the doctor said.
Clumsiness. Clumsiness is the first and then we have a list: lazy, wayward, headstrong, fat, ugly, mean, tactless, and cruel. Also a liar. That category includes subheads: (a) False blindness, imaginary pains causing real doubling-up, untrue lapses of hearing, lying leg injuries, fake dizziness, and unproved and malicious malingering s; (b) Being a bad sport. Did I leave out unfriendliness? ... Also unfriendliness.

I'm sorry I'm young," Deborah answered with a bitterness that was half prose. "We have a right to be as crazy as anyone else."
The second part was more a plea, and to her surprise the superbly inhuman fighter smiled softly and said, "Yes ... I suppose that's true, though I never thought of it in those terms before.

She now knew that the death she feared might not be a physical one, that it could be death of the will, the soul, the mind, the laws, and thus not death, but a perpetual dying.

The woman was sane; she accepted the heavy penalties of reality and enjoyed its gifts also.

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

Ghosts of the past still clutch at you in the present

What cook can match herself against hunger and memory?

Yr had a region called the Fear-bog. Lactamaeon had taken her there once to see the monsters and corpses of her nightmares accumulating there from year after year of terrifying dreams. They had swum through the almost solid ground.
She had said, What is that awful stench?
Shame and secrecy, Bird-one, shame and secrecy, he had answered.

And what does that signify to you? he said, perhaps forgetting that if she could speak truly to the world, she would not be a mental patient.

It suffered and died in translation.

At least being nuts is being somewhere.

If one is to be doomed, one must be beautiful, or the drama is only a comedy.

The rose-garden world of perfection is a lie ... and a bore, too!

The hidden strength is too deep a secret. But in the end ... in the end it is our only ally.

To praise one thing is not to damn another.

What do you do with mother love and mother wit when the babies are grown and gone away?

Suicide is a crime - the only crime that, if successful, guarantees that the perpetrator will not be punished for it. This makes it the most serious crime of all.

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?

Don't cut bangs with a hatchet. Don't do brain surgery with a pickax.

The horror of the Pit lay in the emergence from it, with the return of her will, her caring, and her feeling of the need for meaning before the return of meaning itself.

A humane and authentic book written by another voice from the trenches.

Worrying is one of my few forms of prayer.

You know... the thing that is so wrong about being mentally ill is the terrible price you have to pay for survival.

Later, they began to explore the secret idea that Deborah shared with all the ill - that she had infinitely more power than the ordinary person and was at the same time also his inferior.

Measure the hate you feel now, and the shame. That quantity is your capacity also to love and to feel joy and to have compassion.

The memory may not change in form, but years of underlining give it a weight that can become tremendous. Each of the many, many times you are called to remember the cold of abandonment, the bars, and the loneliness, this experience says deep inside you, 'You see? That's the way life is, after all.

A nut is someone whose noose broke.

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