Greenberg Quotes

There is, incidently, no way of talking about cats that enables one to come off as a sane person.

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

There is, incidentally, no way of talking about cats that enables one to come off as a sane person.

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.

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.

Einstein said that if quantum mechanics were correct then the world would be crazy. Einstein was right - the world is crazy.

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

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.

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.

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

Do not think for one moment that you are replaceable, Cassie Greenberg,” he said. He sounded almost angry. “For you are anything but.

At least being nuts is being somewhere.

Believe me, I know people who have doting Grandmas. Jessica's Grandma Pearl spent four years knitting her a blanket. Four years! And she's got arthritis. I wonder what Grandma Pearl would think if she knew Jessica lost her virginity to Michael Greenberg under the blanket she spent four years knitting with her crooked fingers.

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!

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

Winter is the time for stories, staying fast by the glow of fire. And outside, in the darkness, the stars are brighter than you can possibly imagine.

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

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.

You know... the thing that is so wrong about being mentally ill is the terrible price you have to pay for survival.

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.

Your best is good enough.

...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.

Follow your gut, Storyteller, it will lead to your happy ending.

The world requires me to re-write its wretched dialogue!

Lesson: Men are false. And they can get away with it. Also, don't murder your sister, even by accident. Sisters are important.

It suffered and died in translation.

You know, the thing is with people who never talk, the thing is you always suppose they're harbouring some enormous secret. But, just possibly, the secret is, they have absolutely nothing to say.

To praise one thing is not to damn another.

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.

In the beginning there was nothing, only time. But since there was no one to count the time, there might as well have been nothing. And then there was an egg. Don't ask how it got there, OK.

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.

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

Humans seem to have an innate drive to master other creatures.

Greenberg wanted to give his pilots an alternate identity. Their problem was that they were trapped in roles dictated by the heavy weight of their country's cultural legacy. They needed an opportunity to step outside those roles ... and language was the key to that transformation.

I’ve never met anyone who’s a hopeless case.” His eyes fluttered closed. “You have never met anyone like me, Miss 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.

She thinks that if she gives it up, she'll lose the great abilities she believes she's acquired. It's a terrible paradox really: the mind falls in love with psychosis. The evil seduction, I call it. (186)

All profoundly original art looks ugly at first.

A nut is someone whose noose broke.

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.

I never promised you a rose garden. I never promised you perfect justice [...] and I never promised you peace or happiness. My help is so that you can be free to fight for all of those things. The only reality I offer is challenge, and being well is being free to accept it or not at whatever level you are capable. I never promise lies, and the rose garden world of perfection is a lie... and a bore, too!

[Greenberg] knew that cultural legacies matter--that they are powerful and pervasive and that they persist, long after their original usefulness has passed. But he didn't assume that legacies are an indelible part of who we are. He believed that if the Koreans were honest about where they came from and were willing to confront those aspects of their heritage that did not suit the aviation world, they could change.

Dido, heartbroken, decides to do what any operatic heroine would do at such a moment: sing an aria, then kill herself.

It would be wonderful if all the salmon we eat could be wild. But as one marine ecologist said to me recently, to continue to eat large wild fish at the rate we've been eating them we would need "four or five" oceans to support the crrent human population.

Along the way [Mozart] got married; fathered seven children (two of whom survived into adulthood); performed as a pianist; violinist; and conductor; maintained a successful teaching studio; wrote thousands of letters; traveled widely; attended the theater religiously; played cards, billiards, and bocce; and rode horseback for exercise. Not bad for someone portrayed as a giggling idiot in the movies.

Eugen Bleuler (who in 1911 coined the word 'schizophrenia') once said that in the end his patients were stranger to him than the birds in his garden. But if they're strangers to us, what are we to them? (26)

ghosts of the past still clutch at you in the present

When outcomes are uncertain, most of us spend a great deal of energy ruminating, worrying, and second-guessing ourselves. Not only is this a waste of time, but it makes us less likely to succeed

They have a complicated saying that likens snow to love." "It speaks of the beauty and the harshness, of watching a perfect flake land on bare skin and melt away in an instant. Of the soft powder giving way underfoot and the creeping chill of ice in your bones turning your lips blue and your fingertips black. Of terrible pain and delirious joy.

I mention a paradox of psychiatry: mental illness is recognized by the patient's distorted thoughts, but treatment is largely indifferent to their content. (104)

What good is your reality, when justice fails and dishonesty is glossed over and the ones who keep faith suffer

When Louise worried bout something, it often turned up in her art.

Positive emotions and mental states may make people more resilient to stress, like sturdy tree branches that bend but don’t break when battered by a storm

Plato believed that insanity was essential to our nature and assumed that it held esoteric knowledge about who we are.

Had they known the difficulties that were to befall them, they might not have been so rash in falling in love. But perhaps there was no way of avoiding it. Fate, karma, the will of the Gods… call it what you like, it was surely meant to happen. After all, in all the vastness of the Universe they had been thrown together.

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.

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.

It's something of a sacrilege nowadays to speak of insanity as anything but the chemical brain disease that on one level it is. But there were moments with my daughter when I had the distressed sense of being in the presence of a rare force of nature, such as a great blizzard or flood: destructive, but in its way astounding too. (4)

You can’t just close your eyes and hope everything turns out all right. That’s a fine strategy for jumping out of an airplane, but it’s no way to conduct your life. In order to get anywhere you must first know where it is you want to go. Then you can figure out how to get there.

All those stories you have told, all those wonderful stories… They are nothing to OUR STORY. People will tell it in years to come… And they will say, that was a story about Love. And about two brave girls who wouldn’t take shit from anyone.

Bir şeyi övmek, bir başka şeyi kötülemek anlamına gelmez.

MAY I BE FILLED WITH LOVING-KINDNESS MAY I BE WELL MAY I BE PEACEFUL AND AT EASE MAY I BE HAPPY

Sometimes you have to fight what won't yield and put yourself where it's safe to be crazy.

Complicated women. We sure are fucking magical.

My inspiration comes from the beauty of the past. That's where I am completely omnipotent. -Louise Bourgeois

Instead of tall and angular shapes regarded as masculine and aggressive, she now turned to soft, rounded forms identified as female or nurturing.

Art is a matter strictly of experience, not of principles, and what counts first and last in art is quality; all other things are secondary.

My men have become weak as women, and my women strong as men.

The service was also very nice. Normally, when food is served, they say, “Bon appétit.” But when this food was dropped, you said, “Son of a bitch!”—even though I saw no puppies.

Give a name to suffering, perhaps the most immediate reminder of our insignificance and powerlessness, and suddenly it bears the trace of the human. It becomes part of our story. It is redeemed.

Let's form a secret society....A League. The League of Secret Storytellers. We shall tell all the stories that are never told. Stories about bad husbands and murderous wives and mad gods and mothers and heroes and darkness and friends and sisters and lovers... Yes! And above all...stories about brave women who don't take shit from anyone.

It’s clear where the world is going. We’re entering a world where every thermostat, every electrical heater, every air conditioner, every power plant, every medical device, every hospital, every traffic light, every automobile will be connected to the Internet. Think about what it will mean for the world when those devices are the subject of attack.” Then he made his pitch. “The world needs a new, digital Geneva Convention.

It is no accident, then, that each of our major wars has served to enhance the power of government in Washington: the Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

She is determined to learn to anticipate her worst bouts of psychosis, and head them off before they overwhelm her. "I'm trying to recognize when it's coming on," she says, "so I can get out of the way or at least drop to the ground like you would when caught in the crossfire of a shootout." (233)

What good is your reality, when justice fails and dishonesty is glossed over and the ones who keep faith suffer .... What good is your reality then?" " .... I never promised you a rose garden. I never promised you perfect justice .... and I never promised you peace or happiness .... The only reality I offer is challenge, and being well is being free to accept it or not at whatever level you are capable. I never promise lies, and the rose-garden world of perfection is a lie...and a bore, too!

When we hear a Mozart piano concerto today, we're most likely to hear the piano part played on a modern concert grand. In the hands of a professional pianist, such a piano can bury the strings and the winds and hold its own against the brass. But Mozart wasn't composing for a nine-foot-long, thousand-pound piano; he was composing for a five-and-a-half-foot-long, hundred-and-fifty-pound piano built from balsa wood and dental floss.

[T]he mere existence of others who have radically different beliefs about the nature of reality poses an explicit challenge to the claims of absolute truth made on behalf of one’s own point of view, thus undermining the anxiety-buffering capacity of that world view.

Frankenstein was quite a man. He was out of favor, he wasn't human. - Edgar Major

Returning to the apartment, I feel a bitter tipsy pleasure at the extent to which my world has fallen apart.

Don't postpone joy

Oturma odasında kan görmekten herkes korkar, ‘Acı çeken birini görmeye dayanamıyorum,’ derler, ‘Onun için git, dışarıda öl!

Seni övmek, böbürlenmek demektir. Deborah'ı övmekse... bağışlamak...

I'm a Queen Bitch and I've got this shit on lock.

İçindeki sönmüş yanardağın yaptığı baskıyı hafifletmenin tek yolu karşı-ateşler yakmak olmuştu artık.

Still others worry that news organizations may pull their punches when reporting about the activities of their corporate parents or partners. Will ABC News go easy on problems at Disney, for example, which owns ABC?

I that too often, women take pieces of themselves they have no reason to hate, and they carry those pieces around like failures. If enough women stopped apologizing, then maybe there'd be less of an expectation for us to always burn bright and stand still. Maybe our complications would become our backbones instead of our scarlet letters. Hannah, it's a relief to stand tall in my own body, rather than shrink because I'm not the woman someone else expected me to be.

When we begin to feel stressed, we create mental stories of worry and regret that compound our mental suffering. We get caught up in negative beliefs about ourselves, regrets about the past, or worries about the future, taking us out of the present moment

The only statistic I care about is return on equity. After many sessions with some of our business school graduates (yes, we do have some), I think they have helped me understand the secret to improving our R.O.E. It seems that if we increase revenues and cut expenses, return on equity goes up and that is what makes me happy. Please make me happy! I can be very unpleasant when I’m not.

You hold in your hands a very special book. It contains one hundred carnival rides of terror. You must remember: horror can come from any direction. It can be as subtle as a spider web's caress, or as vicious as the drop of an axe blade. It can be grim as the reaper, or as sardonic as, well, Sardonicous. It can wear the garments of science or superstition; can be dressed in the trappings of fantasy or the fancy-free. But always it will terrify. And one of the bluntest of its instruments is the short-short story, one of the most difficult of literary devices to master. Not only must each word be perfect-but each comma and period. Nothing can be wasted. In the hands of master executioners, like the authors who fill this book-it can be deadly. So... Die-and die again- one hundred times...

Now the line is: Forget the classics, concentrate on an education for the 21st century! Which apparently means knowing how to operate electronic devices and figure out a spreadsheet. That's not education, it's vocational training. What once were means seem to have become ends in education. And our more with-it "educators" shift with every passing wind, clutching at the latest gimmick the way drowning men do at straws.

The “evils of faction” theme recurs throughout our history, from the writings of the “muckrakers” at the turn of the twentieth century to the Democratic presidential primary campaigns of 2008 with talk of Halliburton’s contracts in Iraq and the shady practices of sub-prime mortgage lenders.

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.

If Sally had been in an accident or come down with some overtly physical disease, I would not hesitate to tell him about it, confident that his sympathies would flow in my direction as a matter of course. But psychosis defies empathy; few people who have not experienced it up close buy the idea of a behavioral disease. It has the ring of an excuse, a license for self-absorption on the most extreme scale. It suggests that one chooses madness and not the other way around. (86)

I have underlined words and sentences in one of the Bibles that has always been my study Bible, but when I look at those words and sentences now, I can’t remember why they were underlined. One day I was rereading a short story by Joanne Greenberg, and I came across a long passage that I had marked off, but as I looked at it, I couldn't remember why. Perhaps I had meant to ask her about it the next time we talked on the phone, but now I have no idea what it could be that I wanted to ask her. My Revised Standard version of the Bible is filled with markings, for I have gone through it word for word with study groups at least four times, and of course, I have used it on various occasions to begin speeches. I know that the underlined passages served some purpose, but here and there are verses that have no special meaning to me. It is almost as if a friend had secretly opened the book and made some markings just to tease me. What was the spirit trying to say to me then that I no longer need to hear? Or, what was I listening for then that I no longer care about?

No nation can approve violence against the most innocent and vulnerable, and expect the effects of that approval to be limited. By 1995, what had seemed a purely private decision in rare circumstances would become a standard method of birth control, an industry, a political litmus test, a rite of passage...a central tenet of a whole culture that centers not around life, its promise and responsibilities, but around self, its creation and cultivation. Those unalienable rights to life and liberty Mr. Jefferson mentioned in the Declaration seem to have been eclipsed by a sad emphasis on the pursuit of happiness. And for all the happiness that the unbridled right to an abortion is supposed to make possible, no political question since slavery seems so heavy with guilt, and its denial. Or else there would be no reason for those who favor abortion to call it something else, "choice" being the most popular euphemism and "reproductive freedom" the most ironic. The signs of this culture of death are now so common that they no longer stand out. In politics and economics, pop culture and art, lifestyle long ago replaced life.

I remember the tale of the rabbi to whom a dead man came with a problem: he believed that he was alive. "Don't you know," the rabbi told him, "that you are no longer among the living? You are in the Land of Confusion." On hearing the story, the rabbi's son worried that he too was in the Land of Confusion. "Once you know that there exists such a world, you cannot be in it," explained the father. (208)

That did it. Mackenzie was seething. Someone suggested that mercenaries be sent over to the Howard barn to forcibly haul Smith into the office. Setting that popular idea aside, the stewards fired the leg-weary Greenberg back to the barn again, bearing yet another message. “Seabiscuit will either be a positive starter tomorrow, or we will refuse his entry entirely.” A few minutes later, Greenberg dragged himself back to the offices with Smith’s counterdemand: No one was to show up at his barn asking to examine the horse. The stewards complied, and Greenberg stumbled back to the Howard barn. In late morning, the administrative office door swung open. The officials looked up, expecting to see Greenberg. It was Smith. The stewards sat blinking at him. “All right,” Smith said. “Take the ‘doubtful starter’ off the blank. Seabiscuit will run all right.” Back at the barn, resting his sore legs, Greenberg saw Smith laughing. “The madder they got, the better he liked it,” Greenberg remembered. “He just done that for bein’ onery.” On July 16 a record sixty thousand people pressed into Hollywood Park to see Seabiscuit try for the Gold Cup, while millions more crowded around radio sets to hear NBC’s national

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.

The owners and top managers of most news media organizations tend to be conservative and Republican. This is hardly surprising. The shareholders and executives of multi-billion-dollar corporations are not very interested in undermining the free enterprise system, for example, income from offended advertisers. These owners and managers ultimately decide which reporters, newscasters, and editors to hire or fire, promote or discourage. Journalists who want to get a head, therefore, may have to come to terms with the policies of the people who own and run media businesses.

Her dream began with winter darkness. Out of this darkness came a great hand, fisted. It was a man's hand, powerful and hollowed by shadows in the wells between the bones and tendons. The fist opened and in the long plain of the palm lay three small pieces of coal. Slowly the hand closed, causing within the fist a tremendous pressure. The pressure began to generate a white heat and still it increased. There was a sense of weighing, crushing time. She seemed to feel the suffering of the coal with her own body, almost beyond the point of being borne. At last she cried out to the hand, Stop it! Will you never end it! Even a stone cannot bear this limit...even a stone...! After what seemed like too long a time for anything molecular to endure, the torments in the fist relaxed. The fist turned slowly and very slowly opened. Diamonds, three of them. Three clear and brilliant diamonds, shot with light, lay in the good palm. A deep voice called to her, Deborah! and then gently, Deborah this will be you.