It is, at the most basic level, a bundle of contradictions: a desire for power that strips you of all power. A gesture of strength that divests you of all strength.

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.

You can never destroy the barbarian culture of hatred, violence, and death by killing barbarians. You have to destroy the philosophy that makes them barbarian.

Sudden, hell. I've been hard for two months.

If they would rather die, . . . they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.

I hope we will come together as a nation and do whatever it takes to keep guns away from people who have no business with them.

It is, I think, harder for women. I haven't quite figured it out, and all of my women friends haven't figured it out -how the hell do you do this? How do you work and have families?

It was a terrible decision, and I confess I'd make it again.

Mere flimflam stories, and nothing but shams and lies.

Doubt is the necessary tool of knowledge.

Luckily I have a brother who looks after my administration and my money, because I'm a total spendthrift.

Evil triumphs when good men do nothing.