The Quiet Room Quotes

“I didn’t know how to communicate my suffering to anyone else. My anger was returning. I was screaming for help, but the language I was speaking no one seemed to understand.”
― Lori Schiller, The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness

“When I was up she taught me to recognize the feeling and savor it. “Remember how good you feel now,” she said. “There will be times later on when everything will seem bleak. I don’t want to minimize the grim and harsh times. I know how bad you feel then. But they won’t last forever. Capture the good moments,” she said.”
― Lori Schiller, The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness

“Even though the Voices were far more intense in the hospital than before, in some ways they were less frightening. When I was in high school and college, they had sneaked up on me, blasting out of the airwaves almost without warning. By now, they had become almost familiar. I hated them. I suffered from them. But they seemed almost a normal part of living. I knew them. I understood them and they understood me.”
― Lori Schiller, The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness

“Over and over I had to reassure her. “You hate me,” she would say. “Lori, I don’t hate you. I love you.” Finally it began to dawn on me. When she challenged me like that, she wasn’t making a statement. She was asking a question. And she needed to hear the answer. She needed to hear that I still accepted her. She needed to hear that I still cared for her. Over and over again she needed to hear me tell her that I loved her.”
― Lori Schiller, The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness

“I felt hopeless. I was never going to get better. All I was doing was spending time that was really wasted since I was ultimately going to get done what had to be done. Put your finger in a bucket of water and pull it out. The hole left is how much I’d be missed. Killing myself was my job, my responsibility.”
― Lori Schiller, The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness

“If you decide you have to kill yourself,” he said, “in the last second before you act, picture my face. Listen to me giving you one last plea not to do it. And know that someone really cares.”
― Lori Schiller, The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness

“A long time ago I realized that, as psychiatrists, we had to have a healthy respect for our own humanness, and our own smallness in the face of what we were dealing with. If a person got better, we could appreciate that we had done a good job, but we also needed to realize that God – or luck – was on our side. If the person got worse and had to go to a state hospital, we had to keep ourselves from feeling that we hadn’t done enough. For the truth is, we were powerless in so many of these situations. We did what we could, but sometimes the illness was just bigger than we were.”
― Lori Schiller, The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness

“Dr. Fischer and I kept in touch with each other for about a year after she left the hospital. Then one day I received a letter telling me she was about to have a baby. I couldn’t take it. I destroyed all the letters she had sent me, and never wrote her another one.”
― Lori Schiller, The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness

“Now that I’m back to my college weight—118 pounds—I feel chic and pretty again.”
― Lori Schiller, The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness

“I learned how to put aluminum foil in the bottom of a pan when cooking steak or chicken to make cleaning up easier.”
― Lori Schiller, The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness

“She weighed 170 pounds. She was enormous.”
― Lori Schiller, The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness

“Once Dad brought a lobster dinner—complete with melted butter, claw crackers and bibs. When they brought food for me, they often brought enough for everyone on the unit.”
― Lori Schiller, The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness

“Mom just shook her head that I would be so stupid as to add drug addiction to my other problems.”
― Lori Schiller, The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness

“And patients weren’t even allowed to handle matches. Staff walked around with lighters hung from their necks to light patients’ cigarettes when they asked.”
― Lori Schiller, The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness

“We continued to have long silences punctuated by discussions about medication.”
― Lori Schiller, The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness

“And as for my newfound “cure,” that was all a matter of control too. Everyone needs to breathe, but people can still hold their breath underwater. If you practice, you can hold your breath for much longer than you ever believed possible. That’s what holding my Voices inside was like. Sure, I could hold it for a few seconds longer. But the explosive rage was building inside all the more for not being allowed to be expressed.”
― Lori Schiller, The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness

“Killing myself was my job, my responsibility. I mentally punished myself each day for not having done it yet. The”
― Lori Schiller, The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness