Breanna > Breanna's Quotes

“There is nothing that you can do to me that my own craziness doesn't do to me smarter and faster and better.”
― Joanne Greenberg, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

“I once had a patient who used to practice the most horrible tortures on himself, and when I asked him why he did such things, he said, 'Why, before the world does them.' I asked him then, 'Why not wait and see what the world will do?' and he said, 'Don't you see? It always come at last, but this way at least I am master of my own destruction.”
― Joanne Greenberg, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

“The people on the edge of Hell were most afraid of the devil; for those already in hell the devil was only another and no one in particular.”
― Joanne Greenberg, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

“The hidden strength is too deep a secret. But in the end...in the end it is our only ally.”
― Joanne Greenberg, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

“At least being nuts is being somewhere.”
― Joanne Greenberg, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

“Sometimes the world is so much sicker than the inmates of its institutions.”
― Joanne Greenberg, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

“The woman was sane; she accepted the heavy penalties of reality and enjoyed its gifts also.”
― Hannah Green, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

“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.”
― Joanne Greenberg, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

“The sick are all so afraid of their own uncontrollable power! Somehow they cannot believe that they are only people, holding only a human-sized anger!”
― Joanne Greenberg, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

“The creative strength is good enough and deep enough to bring itself to flower and to grow in spite of this sickness.”
― Joanne Greenberg, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

“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.”
― Joanne Greenberg, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

“There is no past or future. Using tenses to divide time is like making chalk marks on water.”
― Janet Frame

“Life is hell, but at least there are prizes. Or so one thought.”
― Janet Frame, The Reservoir: Stories and Sketches

“People dread silence because it is transparent; like clear water, which reveals every obstacle—the used, the dead, the drowned, silence reveals the cast-off words and thoughts dropped in to obscure its clear stream. And when people stare too close to silence they sometimes face their own reflections, their magnified shadows in the depths, and that frightens them. I know; I know.”
― Janet Frame, Scented Gardens for the Blind

“I must go down to the seas again
to find where I
buried the hatchet with Yesterday.”
― Janet Frame

“I knew then that I would have to be careful. I would have to wear gloves, to leave no trace when I burgled the crammed house of feeling and took for my own use exuberance depression suspicion terror.”
― Janet Frame

“I tried to say beware the room is laid with traps and hung with hooks.”
― Janet Frame

“Then I rise disembodied from the dark to grasp and attach myself like a homeless parasite to the shape of my identity and its position in space and time. At first, I cannot find my way, I cannot find myself where I left myself, someone has removed all trace of me.”
― Janet Frame

“For your own good” is a persuasive argument that will eventually make man agree to his own destruction.”
― Janet Frame, Faces in the Water

“Nothing is simple if your mind is a fetch-and-carry wanderer from sliced perilous outer world to secret safe inner world; if when night comes your thought creeps out like a furred animal concealed in the dark, to find, seize, and kill its food and drag it back to the secret house in the secret world, only to discover that the secret world has disappeared or has so enlarged that it's a public nightmare.”
― Janet Frame, Towards Another Summer

“The uncanny first impression was again one of private hells coexisting in public space.”
― Patrick McGrath, Asylum

“He is a human being in kid's clothing. He has the organs and the feeling of his species, but none of the rights. And he is not alone. This country is stewing itself in the notion that you're not a person until you reach voting and drinking age. It's wrong. You don't get it, Doctor (with all due respect), and because you don't get it you can't give it. Let him go home. He isn't crazy, he isn't even strange. We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
― Howard Buten

“I figured out that I can't forget. I can't really forgive. But I can live. Live with it. Like you live with a scar or a limp or whatever. You always know it's there. It reminds you never to let yourself do anything so stupid and horrible and wrong again. I step out of my rut, step again, and keep stepping. (277)”
― Gail Giles, Right Behind You

“Just like the breakthroughs, the bad stuff always takes you by surprise. (121)”
― Gail Giles, Right Behind You

“Did you read the book or did you just read the words in order?”
― Gail Giles, Right Behind You

“You know, Young, this is as good as anything gets. I wonder if this is it? Is this the very best day I'll ever have? (122)”
― Gail Giles, Shattering Glass

“Break up? We didn't break up. He gave me away.”
― Gail Giles, Shattering Glass

“Words were different when they lived inside of you.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“I bet you could sometimes find all the mysteries of the universe in someone's hand.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“To be careful with people and with words was a rare and beautiful thing.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe