Joanne Greenberg Quotes

“There is nothing that you can do to me that my own craziness doesn't do to me smarter and faster and better.”

— Joanne Greenberg

I once had a patient who used to practice the most horrible tortures on himself, and when I asked him why he did such things, he said, 'Why, before the world does them.' I asked him then, 'Why not wait and see what the world will do?' and he said, 'Don't you see? It always come at last, but this way at least I am master of my own destruction.

— Joanne Greenberg

“The people on the edge of Hell were most afraid of the devil; for those already in hell the devil was only another and no one in particular.”

— Joanne Greenberg

“The hidden strength is too deep a secret. But in the end ... in the end it is our only ally.”

— Joanne Greenberg

“Sometimes the world is so much sicker than the inmates of its institutions.”

— Joanne Greenberg

“At least being nuts is being somewhere.”

— Joanne Greenberg

“She now knew that the death she feared might not be a physical one, that it could be death of the will, the soul, the mind, the laws, and thus not death, but a perpetual dying.”

— Joanne Greenberg

“Measure the hate you feel now, and the shame. That quantity is your capacity also to love and to feel joy and to have compassion.”

— Joanne Greenberg

“To experience the reality was to suffer a boredom as endless as the illness itself ... the boredom of insanity was a great desert, so great that anyone's violence or agony seemed an oasis, and the brief companionship seemed like a rain in the desert that was numbered and counted and remembered long after it was gone.”

— Joanne Greenberg

“The woman was sane; she accepted the heavy penalties of reality and enjoyed its gifts also.”

— Joanne Greenberg

“And if I fight, then for what?"
"For nothing easy or sweet, and I told you that last year and the year before that. For your own challenge, for your own mistakes and the punishment for them, for your own definition of love and of sanity - a good strong self with which to begin to live.”

— Joanne Greenberg

I'm sorry I'm young," Deborah answered with a bitterness that was half prose. "We have a right to be as crazy as anyone else."
The second part was more a plea, and to her surprise the superbly inhuman fighter smiled softly and said, "Yes ... I suppose that's true, though I never thought of it in those terms before.

— Joanne Greenberg

“The rose-garden world of perfection is a lie ... and a bore, too!”

— Joanne Greenberg

“The horror of the Pit lay in the emergence from it, with the return of her will, her caring, and her feeling of the need for meaning before the return of meaning itself.”

— Joanne Greenberg

“The sick are all so afraid of their own uncontrollable power! Somehow they cannot believe that they are only people, holding only a human-sized anger!”

— Joanne Greenberg

“The creative strength is good enough and deep enough to bring itself to flower and to grow in spite of this sickness.”

— Joanne Greenberg

“And what does that signify to you? he said, perhaps forgetting that if she could speak truly to the world, she would not be a mental patient.”

— Joanne Greenberg

“Yr had a region called the Fear-bog. Lactamaeon had taken her there once to see the monsters and corpses of her nightmares accumulating there from year after year of terrifying dreams. They had swum through the almost solid ground.
She had said, What is that awful stench?
Shame and secrecy, Bird-one, shame and secrecy, he had answered.”

— Joanne Greenberg

“It suffered and died in translation.”

— Joanne Greenberg

“If one is to be doomed, one must be beautiful, or the drama is only a comedy.”

— Joanne Greenberg

“Later, they began to explore the secret idea that Deborah shared with all the ill-that she had infinitely more power than the ordinary person and was at the same time also his inferior.”

— Joanne Greenberg

“People were differentiated by this substance, which was called nganon. Nganon was a concentrate which was defined in each person by nurture and circumstance. She believed that she and a certain few others were not of the same nganon as the rest of Earth's people. At first Deborah had thought that it was only she who was set apart from human kind, but others of the un-dead on D ward seemed to be tainted as she was. All of her life, herself and all her possessions had been imbued with her essence, the poisonous nganon. She had never lent her clothes or books or pencils, or let anyone touch any of her things, and she had often borrowed or stolen from other children at school or camp, delighting, until their stolen nganon wore off them, in the health and purity and grace of the possessions.”

— Joanne Greenberg

“Can you read my thoughts?" she asked them.
"Are you talking to me?" Lee said.
"To all of you. Can you read my thoughts?"
"What are you trying to do-get me sent to seclusion?"
"Go to hell", Helene said pleasantly.
"Don't look at me," Miss Coral said, with the genteel horror of a countess visiting an abattoir, "I can't even read my own.”

— Joanne Greenberg

“Among equals gratitude is reciprocal; her gratitude to these Titans, who called themselves average and were unaware of their own tremendous strength in being able to live, only made her feel more lost, inept, and lonely than ever.”

— Joanne Greenberg

“To praise one thing is not to damn another.”

— Joanne Greenberg

“Do you know why you're here?' the doctor said.
Clumsiness. Clumsiness is the first and then we have a list: lazy, wayward, headstrong, fat, ugly, mean, tactless, and cruel. Also a liar. That category includes subheads: (a) False blindness, imaginary pains causing real doubling-up, untrue lapses of hearing, lying leg injuries, fake dizziness, and unproved and malicious malingering s; (b) Being a bad sport. Did I leave out unfriendliness? ... Also unfriendliness.”

— Joanne Greenberg

“A nut is someone whose noose broke.”

— Joanne Greenberg

“Ghosts of the past still clutch at you in the present”

— Joanne Greenberg

“Here as elsewhere, the attackers were favored above the attacked. They were not so far from the world after all.”

— Joanne Greenberg

“She was, after all, at home on D ward, more than she had ever been anywhere, and for the first time as a recognizable and defined thing-one of the nuts. She would have a banner under which to stand.”

— Joanne Greenberg

“Don't cut bangs with a hatchet. Don't do brain surgery with a pickax.”

— Joanne Greenberg

“If I want to die, what am I saving myself for?”

— Joanne Greenberg

“Worrying is one of my few forms of prayer.”

— Joanne Greenberg

Suicide is the ultimate 'one-up,' as it were, the accusation that brooks no defense, the argument won at last.

— Joanne Greenberg

Suicide is a crime - the only crime that, if successful, guarantees that the perpetrator will not be punished for it. This makes it the most serious crime of all.

— Joanne Greenberg

I have found this to be true, that one sin begets a dozen others.

— Joanne Greenberg

What do you do with mother love and mother wit when the babies are grown and gone away?

— Joanne Greenberg

“Money in the hand is real - coins and bills. The rest I don't believe in, and I don't think I ever did, really. What's a check, after all, but a promise - mine, the bank's. Me, I know, but the bank?”

— Joanne Greenberg

Anybody can hear - it takes brains to listen.

— Joanne Greenberg

“What cook can match herself against hunger and memory?”

— Joanne Greenberg

All children blackmail their parents with their innocence.

— Joanne Greenberg

“A humane and authentic book written by another voice from the trenches.”

— Joanne Greenberg