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.

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.

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.

At least being nuts is being somewhere.

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.

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.

...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.

To praise one thing is not to damn another.

It suffered and died in translation.

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.

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

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.

A nut is someone whose noose broke.

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!

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.

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.

ghosts of the past still clutch at you in the present

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.

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

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

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.

Bir şeyi övmek, bir başka şeyi kötülemek anlamına gelmez.

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!

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

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?

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

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

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

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.

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.

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?

Causes are too big to see all at once, or even as they really are, but we can tell our own truths and have our own causes.

For my truth the world gives only lies.

Pride must be the ability to die in agony as if you did it every day, gracefully. Even his pride in her was anger.

Deborah’ın, insan maddesi taşısa bile, kendisiyle insan ırkının öteki üyeleri arasındaki mesafenin ne denli büyük geldiğini bu insanlara anlatması olanaksızdı.

He sat in another season - spring time, maybe - beneath a separate sun whose rays ended at the periphery of her eyesight, her reality.

She always did feel sharp for things that was done wrong to her. I think she felt hurts more, say, than me. It's cause she's smarter; she got more person to hurt.

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

To those who had never dared to think of themselves, except in secret, as eccentric and strange, freedom was freedom to be crazy, bats, nuts, loony, and, more seriously, mad, insane, demented, out of one’s mind

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.

In 1948, Chestnut Lodge admitted a teenage girl named Joanne Greenberg, who would go on to bring Fromm-Reichmann a measure of immortality. Greenberg’s 1964 best-seller, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden—a fictionalized memoir, she later called it—was the story of a teenage girl named Deborah Blau who is trapped in the delusional kingdom of Yr. Deborah believes herself to be possessed by an outside force, much the way Daniel Paul Schreber felt that he had been, a half century earlier.

The boredom of insanity was a great desert, so great that anyone's violence or agony seemed an oasis, and the brief simple moments of companionship seemed like a rain in the desert that was numbered and counted and remembered long after it was gone.

The memory may not change in form, but years of underlining give it a weight that can become tremendous. Each of the many, many times you are called to remember the cold of abandonment, the bars, and the loneliness, this experience says deep inside you, 'You see? That's the way life is, after all.

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.

They had shared much of their pasts, most of their fears, and all of their tenuous and fragile hopes, but Deborah had noticed over the years that whenever she mentioned her art, or something on which she was working, a subtle change would come over Carla. Her face would harden almost imperceptibly; her manner would edge toward coolness. Because it was a subtle emotion in a world of erratic oscillations of feeling, of violence, and of lies told by every sense of perception, Deborah had not noticed it in their sick times. But one day the world had cleared enough so that she realised that at any mention of her art, her friend drew back. In their new eagerness for experience and reality, the strange aloofness stood out clearly. [...] She had a dream. In the dream it was winter and night. The sky was thick blue-black and the stars were frozen in it, so that they glimmered. Over the clean white and windswept hills the shadows of snowdrifts drew long. She was walking on the crust of snow, watching the star-glimmer and the snow-glimmer and the cold tear-glimmer in her own eyes. A deep voice said to her, "You know, don't you, that the stars are sound as well as light?" She listened and heard a lullaby made by the voices of the stars, sounding so beautiful together that she began to cry with it. The voice said, "Look out there." She looked toward the horizon. "See, it is a sweep, a curve." Then the voice said, "This night is a curve of darkness and the space beyond it is a curve of human history, with every single life an arch from birth to death. The apex of all of these single curves determines the curve of history and, at last, of man." "I cannot show you yours," the voice said, "but I can show you Carla's. Dig here, deep in the snow. It is buried and frozen - Dig deep." Deborah pushed the snow aside with her hands. It was very cold, but she worked with a great intensity as if there were salvation in it. At last her hand struck something and she tore it up from burial. It was a piece of bone, thick and very strong and curved in a long, high, steady curve. "Is this Carla's life?" she asked. "Her creativity?" "It is bone-deep with her, though buried and frozen." The voice paused a moment and then said, "It's a fine one - a fine solid one!" [...] "Please don't be angry," she said, and then told Carla the dream. [...] She wiped her eyes. "It was only a dream, your dream..." "It's true anyway," Deborah said. "The one place I could never go..." Carla said musing, "...the one hunger I could never admit." When Deborah finished, Furii said, "You always took your art for granted, didn't you? I used to read in the ward reports all the time how you managed to do your drawing in spite of every sort of inconvenience and restriction.

Were you ever in a pack and had a hair get in your eye?” Deborah asked, remembering the struggles she had had sometimes with hairs or fluff or itches, little devilish mites of annoyance that seemed to be the whole world when you could not reach up and push them aside. “I am a hair in my eye,” Helene said coolly, “and so are you.

The heavy textbooks gave her a kind of pride, as if she might someday weigh in the world what her schoolbooks weighed in her arms.

Because psychosis, even if it is painted as an escape, does involve suffering.

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

You will not have to give up anything until you are ready, and then there will be something to take its place.

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

Soon there would be no place to go and she would have to meet herself as she planned her own destruction.

When you admire the world again, wait for our darkness.

You are freer to be understanding and forgiving.

Remember me. Remember me in anger, fear me in bitter anger. Heat-craze my teeth in bitterest anger. The signal glance drops. The Game is over.

But these symptoms are built of many needs and serve many purposes, and that is why getting them away makes so much suffering.

Alive is fighting.

If one by one was good enough for God, it would have to do for her.

Yet with the terror connected with the hedged-about, circled-around word “crazy,” the unspoken word that Deborah was thinking about now, there was a light coming from the doctor’s spoken words, a kind of light that shone back on many rooms of the past. The home and the school and all of the doctors’ offices ringing with the joyful accusation: There Is Nothing The Matter With You. Deborah had known for years and years that there was more than a little the matter—something deeply and gravely the matter, more even than the times of blindness, intense pain, lameness, terror, and the inability to remember anything at all might indicate. They had always said, “There is nothing the matter with you, if you would only . . .” Here at last was a vindication of all the angers in those offices.

In her mind, the proof of Yr’s reality had become its very cruelty, for it was like the world, whose promises were all lies and whose advantages and privileges were, in the end, evil and agony. A sweetness turned into a need, the need into a force, the force into total tyranny.

Reality was not inside this car with her singing mother and cheerful father, but toward the murky sky finishing with its rain, exhausted and dark. It occurred to her that this darkness was now, and was forever going to be, the color of her life. Years later, after other realities had been argued for between her soul and the world, Lactamaeon reminded her of that day of knowledge.

He was frightened of the craziness he saw around him because it was an extension of something inside himself. He wanted people to be crazier and more bizarre than they really were so that he could see the line which separated him, his inclinations and random thoughts, and his halfwishes, from the full-bloomed, exploded madness of the patients.

Those are nightingales. So lovely. See, the girl has all the advantages, all that money can buy, only the birds use her hair for nests and to polish those crowns, and they burnish the scepter with her bones. She has the finest of crowns and the heaviest of scepters and everyone says, ‘Lucky girl, with all that!’ 

Somewhere inside Deborah an awful ache rose, a recent but now familiar ache which she had begun to identify with Yri words—an ache hiding the ancient and fearsome English word: Truth.

My God, she thought, I am now what I was in the world—a motionless mountain whose inner part is a volcano.

Are you still cold?” the doctor asked. “Yes, ever since these rains began to fall and the icy fogs settled. On the ward they never turn the heat on.” “Well, in the outside—the world—it is August. The sky is clear and the sun is very hot. I am afraid that the cold and the fog are inside you.

So they come back; the ones who are too stubborn to accept that their nganons are poisonous and who are beaten to ruins. They come back, and slowly, they get up off the ward’s floors, shaking like the loser in a prizefight, and after a while stagger back toward the world again and again, and come back, not on the canvas, but in it. How many times will it take before they die at last?

It was this eternal estrangement, not fire agains her flesh, that was the agony.

The possible futures stretched before her like the hall down which she was now walking from the administrative offices: a long road with carefully labeled doors every ten feet of the way—all closed

Cehennem’in eşiğine gelmiş kişilerin şeytandan ödü kopuyordu; zaten cehennemin içinde olanlar içinse şeytan özel biri değildi, yalnızca başka biriydi, o kadar.

I never promised you a rose garden.  I never promised you perfect justice…and I never promised you peace or happiness... I never promise lies, and the rose-garden world of perfection is a lie…

some running in terror from the whip of subtle simalarity between the madwomens utterd thoughts and their own unuttered ones

to all of you, can you read my thoughts?" (...) "Dont look at me" miss coral said, with the genteel horror of the countless visiting abattori. "i cant even read my own

I gave the knife to the one that had to stay behind

We both had it together. You don't decied to sneeze, you just do it. No one had the idea or was the leader; we just did it and were.

Gurur, sanki her gün yapılan bir şeymiş gibi, soylu bir biçimde üzüntüden ölme yetisi anlamındaydı.

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, <> 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, <> and then gently, <>

Everyone is so afraid of getting blood on the living room floor. ‘I can’t stand to see suffering,’ they say, ‘so die outside.

Everyone is so afraid of getting blood on the living room floor. ‘I can’t stand to see suffering,’ they say, ‘so die outside!

Deborah se ne stava pigramente seduta sul pavimento del reparto in attesa di Anterrabae, quando vide Carla venire verso di lei. "Ciao, Deb...". "Carla? Non pensavo tu fossi quassù". Carla pareva esausta: "Deb...Non ne posso più dell'odio che ho dentro! Ho deciso di venire quassù così posso urlare e sbraitare fino a perdere la voce". Si guardarono sorridendo: sapevano benissimo che il reparto D non era poi il "peggiore", era soltanto il più onesto. Gli altri reparti avevano uno "status" da conservare e una forma da mantenere. Chi sta sul ciglio dell'inferno è terrorizzato dal diavolo, ma per coloro che sono già all'inferno il diavolo è soltanto una persona come le altre, niente di speciale. Nei reparti A e B i sintomi venivano appena bisbigliati, si prendevano i sedativi nel terrore dei rumori forti, del dolore manifesto e della disperazione autentica. Le donne del reparto D oscillavano come navi in mare aperto ma erano libere dai modi subdoli e perfidi di chi tiene nascosta la pazzia.

«Ascolta» disse Furii, «non ti ho mai promesso un giardino di rose. Non ti ho mai promesso una giustizia infallibile... Non ti ho mai promesso né felicità, né tranquillità. Posso però aiutarti a essere libera per poter poi combattere per queste cose. Ciò che posso offrirti è soltanto una sfida e stare bene significa poterla accettare e portarla avanti sfruttando le tue possibilità. Non ti ho mai promesso cose che non esistono e il giardino di rose, il giardino della perfezione non esiste... e se esistesse sarebbe pure noioso!»

In the first days on D ward, Deborah had been able to dramatize herself in her own mind simply by thinking: the insane asylum—the violent ward. It conjured huge and flaming pictures in her mind. The reality had offered a promise of more physical safety, but to experience the reality was to suffer a boredom as endless as the illness itself.

Deborah arabanın arka koltuğunda ayağa kalkıp külrengindeki gökyüzüne ve insanların paltolarına sıkı sıkı sarınarak yürüdükleri ıslak sokaklara bakmıştı. Gerçeklik, şarkı söyleyen annesiyle neşe saçan babasının olduğu bu arabanın içinde değil, boşalttığı yağmurla kendini tüketen, bulutlu ve karanlık gökyüzündeydi. Birden, bu karanlığın o anda olduğu gibi sonsuza değin de yaşamının rengini oluşturacağını düşünmüştü.

Ah şu ana babalar. "Onu iyileştirin," derlerdi hep, "onu, sofra adabını bilen ve bizim kararlaştırdığımız geleceği kabullenen biri olacak biçiminde iyileştirin!" Dr. Fried içini çekti. Zeki, dürüst, iyi yürekli ana-babalara bile çocuklarını aldatmak kolay geliyordu. Kendilerinin hiçbir zaman tenezzül etmeyeceği aldatmacaları, gösterişçiliği, kibirliliği, rahatlıkla çocuklarına uygulayabiliyorlardı.

Bütün bu şeyleri öğrenebiliyorsam..." dedi Deborah, "...okuyup öğrenebiliyorsam, neden hâlâ her şey bu kadar karanlık?" Carla ona bakıp hafifçe gülümsedi. "Deb," dedi, "olguları, kuramları ya da dilleri öğrenmenin kendini anlamayla bir ilgisi olduğunu kim söyledi sana?

İnsanlar yeni kuramlara, yeni deneylere inanmış gibi görünüyorlardı, ama inançları çoğun, biraz kazıyınca altından on binlerce kuşağın korkularının ve düşlemlerinin bir uzantısı olan, katıksız ve içten bir dehşetin ortaya çıktığı bir yaldızdan başka bir şey değildi.

Deborah bayram yemeklerini yemeye ve onu görmeye gelen kişilerle konuşmaya çabalıyordu, ama onların karşısında otururken, kısa sürede yorgunluğun pençesine düşüyordu. Hastanedeki ilişkiler kısa ve geçici oluyordu ve aynı anda en fazla iki ya da üç kişi arasında yaşanıyordu bu ilişkiler. Konuşan kişilerden herhangi birinin üzerine karanlık çöktüğü anda da, sohbet bıçakla kesilir gibi kesiliveriyordu. Oysa şimdi, ardı arkası kesilmeyen gevezelikler, bir ipi parmaklara geçirerek oynanan karmaşık bir çocuk oyununu andırırcasına, iç içe dolanıp duruyordu. Deborah'ın, insan maddesi taşısa bile, kendisiyle insan ırkının öteki üyeleri arasındaki mesafenin ona ne denli büyük geldiğini bu insanlara anlatması olanaksızdı.

The mirror had to be dirtied so that it would no longer reflect the sudden secret vulnerability beneath the surface of hard fists and eyes and obscenity.