Amarachi

“I may have said: it is the perfect escape, isn’t it? To lose your mind. To go mad. To fall apart, go crazy, all of it. To become a patient. To need help and to receive help. To be cared for. I would have added: the perfect escape becomes a trap. You learn this soon enough. You escape and then you begin to play the part, people respond to you that way, the role you are in. And there you are, trapped. It might become your life.”
― Suzanne Scanlon, Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen

“I turned on the light, got up, and looked outside. The street under the streetlights. Even the street is just an idea: the impulse to go somewhere, away from those who have hurt you, or closer to those who love you.”
― Viola Di Grado, Blue Hunger

“Jane's father once told her that white people believed, deep in their hearts, that Black people would all choose to become white if they could. But Black people didn't want to be white, he had told her. They only wanted to have what white people had. He had said race was always about money, and money was always about race. That's what white people didn't understand. Black people wanted only a big yellow Victorian on the hill, not to be the white people who lived there.”
― Danzy Senna, Colored Television

“What if, instead of being diagnosed—being called mentally ill—what if I had been able to receive care for its own sake. To be in distress, to ask for care, to receive it. What if there were space in this world for care.”
― Suzanne Scanlon, Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen