Schizophrenia Quotes

“If you think this Universe is bad, you should see some of the others.”
― Philip K. Dick

“The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.”
― Joseph Campbell, Psychology of the Future: Lessons from Modern Consciousness Research

“Oh, and I certainly don't suffer from schizophrenia. I quite enjoy it. And so do I.”
― Emilie Autumn

“Sometimes I think people take reality for granted.”
― Francesca Zappia, Made You Up

“I didn't realize there was a ranking." I said. "Sadie frowned. "What do you mean?" "A ranking," I said. "You know, what's crazier than what." "Oh, sure there is," Sadie said. She sat back in her chair. "First you have your generic depressives. They're a dime a dozen and usually pretty boring. Then you've got the bulimics and the anorexics. They're slightly more interesting, although usually they're just girls with nothing better to do. Then you start getting into the good stuff: the arsonists, the schizophrenics, the manic-depressives. You can never quite tell what those will do. And then you've got the junkies. They're completely tragic, because chances are they're just going to go right back on the stuff when they're out of here." "So junkies are at the top of the crazy chain," I said. Sadie shook her head. "Uh-uh," she said. "Suicides are." I looked at her. "Why?" "Anyone can be crazy," she answered. "That's usually just because there's something screwed up in your wiring, you know? But suicide is a whole different thing. I mean, how much do you have to hate yourself to want to just wipe yourself out?”
― Michael Thomas Ford

“I think a lot of psychopaths are just geniuses who drove so fast that they lost control.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Believing something existed and then finding out it didn't was like reaching the top of the stairs and thinking there was one more step.”
― Francesca Zappia, Made You Up

“Knowing that you're crazy doesn't make the crazy things stop happening.”
― Mark Vonnegut, The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity

“I didn't have the luxury of taking reality for granted. And I wouldn't say I hated people who did, because that's just about everyone. I didn't hate them. They didn't live in my world.

But that never stopped me from wishing I lived in theirs.”
― Francesca Zappia, Made You Up

“In my opinion, our health care system has failed when a doctor fails to treat an illness that is treatable.”
― Kevin Alan Lee, The Split Mind: Schizophrenia from an Insider's Point of View

“Am I a mindless fool? My life is a fragment, a disconnected dream that has no continuity. I am so tired of senselessness. I am tired of the music that my feelings sing, the dream music.”
― Ross David Burke, When the Music's Over: My Journey into Schizophrenia

“My dad once told me life would get complicated when I grew up. I’m guessing this isn’t what he meant. My mom, on the other hand, agreed with him, and I’m guessing this kind of thing is exactly what she meant.”
― Susan Ee, World After

“Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.”
― R.D. Laing

“The only thing you have for measuring what's real is your mind . . . so what happens when your mind becomes a pathological liar?”
― Neal Shusterman, Challenger Deep

“Can you smell his sweat? That peculiar goatish odor is trans-3-methyl-2 hexenoic acid. Remember it, it's the smell of schizophrenia.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“My good fortune is not that I've recovered from mental illness. I have not, nor will I ever. My good fortune lies in having found my life.”
― Elyn R. Saks, The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness

“The LSD phenomenon, on the other hand, is—to me at least—more interesting. It is an intentionally achieved schizophrenia, with the expectation of a spontaneous remission—which, however, does not always follow. Yoga, too, is intentional schizophrenia: one breaks away from the world, plunging inward, and the ranges of vision experienced are in fact the same as those of a psychosis. But what, then, is the difference? What is the difference between a psychotic or LSD experience and a yogic, or a mystical? The plunges are all into the same deep inward sea; of that there can be no doubt. The symbolic figures encountered are in many instances identical (and I shall have something more to say about those in a moment). But there is an important difference. The difference—to put it sharply—is equivalent simply to that between a diver who can swim and one who cannot. The mystic, endowed with native talents for this sort of thing and following, stage by stage, the instruction of a master, enters the waters and finds he can swim; whereas the schizophrenic, unprepared, unguided, and ungifted, has fallen or has intentionally plunged, and is drowning.”
― Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By

“I keep moving ahead, as always, knowing deep down inside that I am a good person and that I am worthy of a good life.”
― Jonathan Harnisch

“We children of schizophrenics are the great secret keepers, the ones who don't want you to think that anything is wrong.”
― Mira Bartok, The Memory Palace

“What we call 'normal' is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience.”
― R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience/The Bird of Paradise

“You know... the thing that is so wrong about being mentally ill is the terrible price you have to pay for survival.”
― Joanne Greenberg, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

“You can’t be beaten by something you laugh at.”
― Jonathan Harnisch, Freak

“The drug I take is called schizophrenia, among other labels, which I desperately want to put away. I want to put the drug of schizophrenia down, and I want to put down the stigma surrounding its label.”
― Jonathan Harnisch, Second Alibi: The Banality of Life

“There’s a tremendous need to implode the myths of mental illness, to put a face on it, to show people that a diagnosis does not have to lead to a painful and oblique life....We who struggle with these disorders can lead full, happy, productive lives, if we have the right resources.”
― Elyn R. Saks

“It’s more than that now. I can’t tell the difference between what’s part of me and what’s not.”
― Neal Shusterman, Challenger Deep

“I should already know that my thoughts are never alone.”
― Neal Shusterman, Challenger Deep

“The Japanese psychiatrist Kimura Bin, director of the Psychiatric Hos- pital of Kyoto and translator of Binswanger, sought to deepen Heidegger’s anal- ysis of temporality in Being and Time with reference to a classification of the fundamental types of mental illness. To this end he made use of the Latin for- mula post festum (literally, “after the celebration”), which indicates an irreparable past, an arrival at things that are already done. Post festum is symmetrically dis- tinguished from ante festum (“before the celebration”) and intra festum (“during the celebration”).
Post festum temporality is that of the melancholic, who always experiences his own “I” in the form of an “I was,” of an irrecoverably accomplished past with respect to which one can only be in debt. This experience of time corresponds in Heidegger to Dasein’s Being-thrown, its finding itself always already abandoned to a factual situation beyond which it can never venture. There is thus a kind of constitutive “melancholy” of human Dasein, which is always late with respect to itself, having always already missed its “celebration.”
Ante festum temporality corresponds to the experience of the schizophrenic, in which the direction of the melancholic’s orientation toward the past is in- verted. For the schizophrenic, the “I” is never a certain possession; it is always something to be attained, and the schizophrenic therefore always lives time in the form of anticipation. “The ‘I’ of the schizophrenic,” Kimura Bin writes, “is not the ‘I’ of the ‘already been’; it is not tied to a duty. In other words, it is not the post festum ‘I’ of the melancholic, which can only be spoken of in terms of a past and a debt. . . . Instead, the essential point here is the problem of one’s own possibility of being oneself, the problem of the certainty of becoming oneself and, therefore, the risk of possibly being alienated from oneself” (Kimura Bin 1992: 79). In Being and Time, the schizophrenic’s temporality corresponds to the primacy of the future in the form of projection and anticipation. Precisely because its experience of time originally temporalizes itself on the basis of the future, Dasein can be defined by Heidegger as “the being for whom, in its very Being, Being is always at issue” and also as “in its Being always already anticipat- ing itself.” But precisely for this reason, Dasein is constitutively schizophrenic; it always risks missing itself and not being present at its own “celebration.”
― Giorgio Agamben, The Omnibus Homo Sacer

“It’s not that I’m suffering inside a prison. It’s that I am the prison. I’m the cell, the bars, the locked door, and the scream no one hears.”
― Jonathan Harnisch, Sex, Drugs, and Schizophrenia

“Have you ever gotten to the point where even eating food, sleeping, or doing anything your brain isn’t head-over-heels crazy about feels like a waste of time?”
“Because that’s how it is for me — doing anything outside what my brain craves feels like wasted time.”
― Mohit Yenugwar

“I know cigarettes are killing me from the inside, but so are my illnesses. And after years of juggling meds—five, six, maybe more—my psychiatrist and I have finally, I think, landed on a combination that holds me together. I’m not claiming the pills are weak, or that they should perform miracles and pull every last demon out of my head in an instant. Healing isn’t a switch. It’s slow. It drags.

But even with the medication steadying me, there are still nights when anxiety claws at my ribs, when depression sinks its teeth into my spine, when I feel misplaced in my own life.
So I smoke. Because for a moment—just a thin, burning moment—it quiets the storm.

Maybe smoking is the small tax I pay to keep myself from collapsing, from snapping, from tipping into madness.
The price is bearable.
Losing my mind wouldn’t be.”
― Mohit Yenugwar