“...a primary feature of the experience of staying in a psychiatric hospital is that you will not be believed about anything. A corollary to this feature: things will be believed about you that are not at all true.”
― The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays
― The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays
“Learn to read symptoms not only as problems to be overcome but as messages to be heeded.”
― When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress
― When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress
“A poem is good if it contains a new analogy and startles the reader out of the habit of treating words as counters.”
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“One has to be wounded in order to become a healer. This is the local image of a universal mythological motif, which is described in Eliade's book about the initiation of medicine men and shamans. Nobody becomes either one or the other without first having been wounded, either cut open by the initiator and having certain magical stones inserted into his body, or a spear thrown at his neck, or some such thing. Generally, the experiences are ecstatic – stars or ghost-like demons – hit them or cut them open, but always they have to be pierced or cut apart before they become healers, for that is how they acquire the capacity for healing others.”
― The Problem of the Puer Aeternus
― The Problem of the Puer Aeternus
“A reminder to remember: just because the sharpness of the sadness has faded does not mean that it was not, once, terrible. It means only that time and space, creatures of infinite girth and tenderness, have stepped between the two of you, and they are keeping you safe as they were once unable to.”
― In the Dream House
― In the Dream House
Ana’s 2025 Year in Books
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