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“the idea that men by nature take their brain seriously and women by nature do not is a belief not an inborn reality.”

“still an overages girl refusing to become an adult”

“It’s the longing for coherence inscribed in the work - that extraordinary attempt at shaping the inchoate through words - it brings peace and excitement, comfort and consolation. But above all, it’s sheer relief from the chaos in the head that reading delivers.”

"Instead, she discovered a certain kinship with her sick brothers. They were ostracized by society. Sometimes she felt that way, too."

"Freedoman had been drawn to the idea that the human mind could synthesize its own, entirely separate reality. 'It just seemed to me if there was ever a disease that was uniquely human and philosophical, it was having schizophrenia,'"

"that idea of whatever society deems to be mental illness sharing the same well-spring as the creative, artistic impulse has been with us for centuries: the artist as the iconoclast and truth-teller, the only sane one in an insane world."

"a growing understanding that reality was not necessarily what he'd once thought, that what he'd been brought up to believe may not be all there is."

"The public conception of madness became hopelessly intertwined with the idea of the mother-as-monster"

"they develop psychosis as a way of coping with it. Tormented by their mothers, they retreat into a world of their own.
Bateson invented this theory without so much as ten minutes of clinical psychiatric experience. But that made no difference. The double-bind, along with the schizophrenogenic mother, helped to turn mother-blaming into the industry standard for psychiatry"

"leave me behind, get rid of the treasures, pretend you don't have a past. It won't work. You'll bring yourself along wherever you go, and the deity will find you there."

"'These days, it is hard to know how to be a person,' she said. 'To avoid doing wrong is not easy, never mind doing good. I have been praying for guidance - a light in this darkness. Now the deity has sent you to me. It's a sign.'"

“It gets boring, just us men. A woman in the group could contribute something different.”

“Respect goes two ways. When’s he going to learn to respect people?”

“It was of course safest to avoid bandits, but since most looked like ordinary people - indeed, if you were unlucky, some of them were your cousin, your uncle, your brother - this was not always possible.”

“So improvisation is the number-one fear in America. Forget a nuclear war or an eight point nine earthquake or another Hitler. It’s improv. Which is funny, because aren’t we just improvising all day long? Isn’t our whole life just one long improvisation? What are we so scared of?”

"But I love you and we are good together. I feel so good when I'm with you. God, I like myself when I'm with you.'
'I'm not sure that's being in love with me, Oscar. That's being in love with you.'"

"My version of clenching. Escaping into someone else's mind for a little while."

"'But don't your think there are larger issues the author is trying to explore?
Yes, but they shouldn't be given primacy over or even separated from the experience of the story itself. An author is trying to give you an immersive adventure.'"

"He manages to simulate consciousness, and its contagious because while you're reading it rubs off on you and your mind starts working like that for a while. I love that. That reverberation for me is what is more important about literature."

"I think of her in her office in Alexandria, playing the role of a lawyer for so many hours a day. I think of all the people playing roles, getting further and further away from themselves, from what moves them, what stirs them all up inside"

“There’s isn’t that feeling you get with some guys, like they’re barreling toward one place and one place only and seeing how fast they can get there without complication or too much conversation.”

"I squat there and think about how you get trained early on as a woman to perceive how others are perceiving you, at the great expense of what you yourself are feeling about them. Sometimes you mix the two up in a terrible tangle that's hard to unravel."

"My voice is nothing special, but when your mother tells you something about yourself, even if you've coaxed it out of her, it's hard not to always believe it."

"The hardest thing about writing is getting in every day, breaking through the membrane. The second hardest thing is getting out. Sometimes I sink down too deep and come up to fast. Afterward I feel wide open and skinless."

"Something like that rips you out of your life and you feel for a long time like you're hovering above it watching people scurry around and none of it makes sense"

"The next day David, the old boyfriend, calls her. They say women have intuition, but men can smell a competitor across state lines."

“I didn’t much like the writers Paco did, men who wrote tender, poetic sentences that tried to hide the narcissism and misogyny of their stories.”

"Some people are like that. They think anyone's amusement must be at their expense."

"She gloried in being a sailor's wife, but she must pay the tax of quick alarm for belonging to that profession which is, if possible, more distinguished in its domestic virtues than in its national importance."

"But I was too proud, too proud to ask again. I did not understand you. I shut my eyes, and would not understand you, or do you justice."