For me, the first sign of oncoming madness is that I'm unable to write.

When you are mad, mad like this, you don't know it. Reality is what you see. When what you see shifts, departing from anyone else's reality, it's still reality to you.

In truth, you like the pain. You like it because you believe you deserve it.

Never, never underestimate the power of desire. If you want to live badly enough, you can live. The great question, at least for me, was: How do I decide I want to live?

...Someone speaks in soft tones to me and says I am psychotic, but it's going to be all right. I put on my hat, unperturbed, and ask for some crayons.

There is, in fact, an incredible freedom in having nothing left to lose.

The term “starvation diet” refers to 900 calories a day. I was on one-third of a starvation diet. What do you call that? One word that comes to my mind: “suicide.

I think many people with a chronic illness would prefer not to have their chronic illness, simply because it's high maintenance.

My bones are brittle, my heart weak and erratic, my esophagus and stomach riddled with ulcers, my reproductive system shot, my immune system useless... I'm not going to have a happy ending.

Madness strips you of memory and leaves you scrabbling around on the floor of your brain for the snatches and snippets of what happened, what was said, and when.

You wake up one morning and there it is, sitting in an old plaid bathrobe in your kitchen, unpleasant and unshaved. You look at it, heart sinking. Madness is a rotten guest.

As long as we were living in the spirit we would continue to be blessed

Well, everything's a lesson, isn't it? Learning all the time, as you could say.

Reach out, share your truth, tell someone, "This is who I am. This is what I stand for. Hold me to it." Often, we'll do far more for another than we will do for ourselves.

A minority may be right and a majority is always wrong.

Extremists think 'communication' means agreeing with them.

State is the nation socially organized.

When I turn the thought around - the thought that war, let's say war in Iraq, should stop - the turnaround is the war in myself should stop.

You just never know how anything is going to go.

Music that was made in the 60s and 70s did come from a really soulful place. The seed for the songs written in the 90s were planted in those songs, even though they were samples.

Raising or caring for children requires sacrifice and service, which, I believe, heals us from the destructive forces of self-centeredness.