“I suppose it was a dream that lasted really about fifty years. By the time universal education had begun to work properly, say 1925, and the time the first teachers started to hold back information...”

“I suppose I was lucky enough to be educated at a time when teachers still thought children could handle knowledge. They trusted us. Then there came a time when they decided that because not every k...”

“Depression - that limp word for the storm of black panic and half-demented malfunction - had over the years worked itself out in Charlotte's life in a curious pattern. Its onset was often impercept...”

“Levade had told her one day that there was no such thing as a coherent personality. When you are forty you have no cell in your body that you had at eighteen. It was the same, he said, with your ch...”

“. . . she read with undifferentiated glee . . .”

“Until she had had children of her own she had not been able to contemplate the death of either of her parents; when the subject had arisen, in conversation or in her own imagining, she had said onl...”

“He tried to sleep, but his head was filled with the faces of lunatics, their palsied hands, their shattered eyes.”

“Love, like madness, can only fill the models that society makes available.”

“PTSD in its rawest form is a death sentence which causes many veterans and others to execute themselves in hope to be free.”

“That millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.”

“You tell them one real thing and then the doctor thinks he knows you. He starts getting arrogant and overfamiliar, making insulting suggestions left and right. You have to protest constantly just t...”

“Leave him with his God. Im sure Hes as hard and unforgiving as Cain is. I dont want to know about Cains God. If he is anything to be guided by, Id rather be an atheist, thank you.”

“What do you think of Cains affirmations?He never told a lie. If he says that God talks to him, he is convinced that God is talking to him.Do you believe he is a saint?God only knows, and never bett...”