Mark Vonnegut Quotes

I understand perfectly why some of my autistic patients scream and flap their arms
it's to frighten off extroverts

Are people who have been crazy held to unfair standards?
Of course, but it's not in your best interest to complain. If you're paranoid and people are looking at you funny it's best to let it pass. Psychotic people have an uncanny knack for making their own worst dreams come true. Depressing things happen to depressed people way beyond what you would expect from random distribution.

But my biggest joy and best education and proudest achievement has been being able to show up for work and life and not cause too much trouble a day at a time in spite of my hysterical, somewhat dramatic, nature.

I was back to being polite, the well-tempered paranoid. I didn't have much of a choice. If I wasn't polite, they could stick me with those needles or put me back in that little room or take away my visitor privileges or any number of other things. Besides, there didn't seem to be any urgency or anything to be gained by not being polite, the way there had been before. So I was polite. There was time.

My parents were told by the principal of West Barnstable Elementary School and my teacher that I was a bright boy whose spelling was in the retarded range and whose handwriting was the worst they'd ever seen. I find it embarrassing that I spell so badly. I will do almost anything to avoid being embarrassed, but no effort either on my part or on the part of any teacher has ever dented my utter bafflement when it comes to choosing which letters to put down, how many, and in what order.

At the end of his life, which had included financial ruin in the Great Depression, his wife's barbiturate addiction and death by overdose, and then his own lung cancer, Doc said, "It was enough to have been a unicorn." What he meant was that he got to do art. It was magic to him that his hands and mind got to make wonderful things, that he didn't have to be just another goat or horse.

Today it's nice to be able to entertain odd thoughts without having to marry them all. Thank God. I can think whatever the hell I want. Entertaining odd thoughts won't make you crazy. Refusing to entertain odd thoughts won't make you well.

Who but a brazen crazy person would go one-on-one with blank paper or canvas armed with nothing but ideas?

In a funny way it's almost fun, having everything be so fucked up and managing to adjust. I guess you might say I'm proud. Proud of me, proud of my friends for managing to deal with this thing so well. For most people this would be the end of the world. They'd panic, their friends would panic. Things would get trampled in the stampede. But we've kept our heads, made the necessary allowances, ad can just ride this thing out.

I'm pretty much just putting in time waiting for this cloud to blow over. Waiting for something to come along to make some sense out of all this. Killing time, waiting for some sort of cavalry to come over the hill. There's really not an awful lot I can do but wait. As long as there's no panic, we can hold out for damn near forever.

It was not easy to go from being one of the seven righteous pillars holding up the whole planet and human race to being just another mental patient. I remember talking to a woman who was ending racism and asking her if it was part of a bigger program or if racism was the whole deal. As someone who had gone back to the beginning of time and dealt with issues of whether or not life itself was a good idea, I wasn't sure that just getting rid of racism was a big enough prize.

....In the eighties when I was called out of retirement to defeat communism, it was over my strenuous objections. "I don't even dislike communism all that much," I objected. "It seems so beside the point." "The Republicans are going to take credit for this and ride it into the ground," I correctly predicted. After winning many many preliminary rounds which I honestly hoped I'd lose, I was smuggled into what was thought to be just another psychiatric hospital where the Russian bear took one look at me, declined to dance, and the rest is history. My delusional world always felt kind of tinny and hollow, but that never helped me get out of it.

None of us are entirely well, and none of us are irrecoverably sick.

Introverts almost never cause me trouble and are usually much better at what they do than extroverts. Extroverts are too busy slapping one another on the back, team building, and making fun of introverts to get much done. Extroverts are amazed and baffled by how much some introverts get done and assume that they, the extroverts, are somehow responsible.

I didn't like the '60s because it was too important what people who had nothing to do with the war thought about it.

Medical care has become a lot of crust and precious little pie.

And if you're lucky enough to survive going crazy and get back to the point where you can pass for normal, it builds a question into the rest of your life. You have to forgive people for wondering, 'How all right can he be?'

I'm not an expert on the Middle East or terrorism or the use of military force or politics. It's all I can do to know a little bit about how to help people raise their kids and what to do when they get sick. When a war happens, I just hope it gets over with quickly so that how we take care of children becomes more important again.

With mental illness the trick is to not take your feelings so seriously; you're zooming in and zooming away from things that go from being too important to being not important at all.

Most adults have forgotten what they had to do to survive childhood.

The way I played music there was the way I wanted to farm, chop wood, cook, make love, raise children. Everything. A lo of it had to do with things I felt while I played. If only I could feel that sense of total absorption in what I was doing when I was doing other things. It was more than absorption, it was spontaneity, competence, a sense of grace and playfulness, of being in touch with an inexhaustible source of energy and beauty.

Fear that I was very different from everyone else. Fear that deep down inside I was a shallow fraud, that after the revolution or after Jesus came down to straighten everything out, everyone from hippies to hard-hats would unfold and blossom into the beautiful people they were while I would remain a gnarled little wart in the corner, oozing bile and giving off putrid smells.

Without writers fooling themselves about what their books might accomplish there would be no books at all.

Well, I thought, last night I paid my dues. I faced death. Now I can stay.

Beyond a certain point, gathering further evidence of the hurtfulness and shortcomings of one's family, employer, et cetera is like eating the same poisonous mushroom over and over and expecting that sooner or later it will be nutritious.

Writing is very hard mostly because until you try to write something down, it's easy to fool yourself into believing you understand things. Writing is terrible for vanity and self-delusion.

Having rationally decided to become less rational, we hoped to find new, meaningful, exciting, useful truths. Folk

A happy person with decent self-esteem wouldn't bother to have credentials as good as mine.

When I talk to the National Alliance on
Mental Illness (NAMI) and other patient
support groups, I take questions at the
end. At one talk I was asked, "What's
the difference between yourself and
someone without mental illness?"
At another talk I was asked, "How do
you make the voices be not so mean?"
I wish I knew.

Schizophrenia's a reasonable reaction to an unreasonable society." It's great on paper. Poetic, noble, etc. But if you happen to be a schizophrenic, it's got some not-so-cheery implications… One of R.D.'s worst sins is how blithely and misleadingly he glides over the suffering involved… Pulling off a revolution and ushering in a new era in which truth and beauty reign triumphant seems unlikely when you're having trouble brushing your teeth or even walking.

I'm willing to make sense as soon as the rest of the world does.

Maybe just being open to things being connected made us see more. Now I shudder whenever I find that sort of connectedness creeping into my life.

I don't think the people today who start hearing voices, stop eating and sleeping, and run amuck are likely to get good treatment. Having more knowledge, better diagnostic capabilities, better medications with fewer side effects, can't make up for the fact that most patients are being treated by doctors, therapists, and hospitals, who are operating under constraints and incentives that reward non-treatment, non-hospitalization, non-therapy, non-follow-up, non-care. Lost to follow-up is the best outcome a health insurer can hope for.

The biggest gift of being unambiguously mentally ill is the time I've saved myself trying to be normal.

My mother, who was radiant, young, and beautiful even as she lay dying, heard voices and saw visions, but she always managed to make friends with them and was much too charming to hospitalize even at her craziest.

I take care of military families. Their sacrifices are very real.

He often said he had to be a writer because he wasn't good at anything else. He was not good at being an employee. Back in the mid-1950's, he was employed for Sports Illustrated, briefly. He reported back to work, was asked to write a short piece on a racehorse that jumped over a fence and tried to run away. Kurt stared at the blank piece of paper all morning and then typed, "The horse jumped over the fucking fence," and walked out, self-employed again.

It's regrets that make painful memories. When I was crazy I did everything just right.

Looking at mental health problems the same way we look at other medical problems is factually correct - the best bet for reducing the disabling symptoms and the only way to lessen the stigma and blame that traditionally double or triple the pain.

Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts. What they subvert is the notion that things have to be the way they are, that you are alone, that no one has ever felt the way you have.

If you take good care of any disease by eating well, sleeping well, being aware of your health, consciously wanting to be well, not smoking, et cetera, you are doing all the things you should be doing anyway, but somehow having a disease makes them easier to do. A human without a disease is like a ship without a rudder.

Put on all the armor of the Lord. Not just the pretty stuff.

Extroverts are amazed and baffled by how much some introverts get done and assume that they, the extroverts, are somehow actually responsible.

We're here to get each other through this thing, whatever it is.

Note to self: being Kurt's son, being an ex-mental patient, getting into Harvard, having written a book, and being a doctor are all things that in and of themselves do not make a life. If you lean on them too hard, you'll find that there's not much there. But if you add up a lot of things that aren't in and of themselves enough, it almost starts to add up to something ...

My only hope was to be polite.

After my first few tastes I was pretty much hooked. I'd have dry spells, months without any or only piddling amounts of grace, but I never forgot about it or stopped wanting it.

The road to medical school started with a job mowing lawns I was far from sure I could handle.

Knowing that you're crazy doesn't make the crazy things stop happening.