Voluntary Madness Quotes

“I'd been at the mercy of a prick on a power trip, the kind of buttoned-up bantam rooster who gets off on control and then, when you resist him, tells you that you've got issues with control.”
― Norah Vincent, Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin

“Normal life is nuts. It's a downhill deterioration to death no matter how you spice it along the way, and there's nothing you can do about it. Now, a sane person, when faced when that, would just plunk his ass down at the starting line, or wherever along the way this realization finally came to him, and say, "Are you kidding? I quit. I'll slide the rest of the way or sit here and smoke." It takes a true lunatic, or someone functioning with the critical apparatus of a worker bee, to keep scrabbling up that hill when he knows his destiny is dust. But that us what is required. Go on.”
― Norah Vincent, Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin

“You want to be happy? You want to be well? Then put your boots on.”
― Norah Vincent, Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin

“I could live alone forever if I just had a view of the sea.”
― Norah Vincent, Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin

“Like so many other high school discipline cases, he'd probably been given some hybrid cockamamie ADHD- bipolar diagnosis at a very young age and been medicated into submission for the benefit of his homeroom teacher. We've all read about them in the paper, the problem kids who get slapped with five disorders by the time they're twelve, and horse-pilled by a culture that has pathologized everything from PMS to teen angst.”
― Norah Vincent, Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin

“We tend to think of happiness (and by happiness I also mean health or overall well-being)as a gift, and sometimes it is, a pure gratuity. But most of the time it comes about because you've done the work, prepared the ground to allow it in or tended it carefully once it has arrived. You have to practice happiness the way you practice the piano, commit to it the way you commit to going to the gym.”
― Norah Vincent, Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin

“... there is a whole hell of a lot of knowledge about the (expletive removed) human condition that we are not ready for.”
― Norah Vincent, Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin

“...they would have all the same stressors still in place, and they would have no means of lessening them, because, their will, if they had amassed any in their time away, was still weak and always a quick casualty. No match for the horrors of lost chances.”
― Norah Vincent, Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin