Joanne Greenberg famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

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

#Secret #Allies #Mental Health
The woman was sane; she accepted the heavy penalties of reality and enjoyed its gifts also.
-- Joanne Greenberg

#Reality #Accepted #Penalties
A nut is someone whose noose broke.
-- Joanne Greenberg

#Nuts #Broke
A humane and authentic book written by another voice from the trenches.
-- Joanne Greenberg

#Book #Voice #Trenches
"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"
-- Joanne Greenberg

#Sorry #Crazy #Half
all children blackmail their parents with their innocence.
-- Joanne Greenberg

#Children #Parent #Innocence
What cook can match herself against hunger and memory?
-- Joanne Greenberg

#Memories #Cooking #Hunger
Anybody can hear - it takes brains to listen.
-- Joanne Greenberg

#Brain #Listening
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

#Money #Real #Believe
What do you do with mother love and mother wit when the babies are grown and gone away?
-- Joanne Greenberg

#Mother #Baby #Gone
I have found this to be true, that one sin begets a dozen others.
-- Joanne Greenberg

#Dozen #Sin #Found
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

#Suicide #Successful #Guarantees
suicide is the ultimate 'one-up,' as it were, the accusation that brooks no defense, the argument won at last.
-- Joanne Greenberg

#Suicide #Defense #Lasts
To praise one thing is not to damn another.
-- Joanne Greenberg

#Praise
The creative strength is good enough and deep enough to bring itself to flower and to grow in spite of this sickness.
-- Joanne Greenberg

#Flower #Creative #Sickness
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

#People #Devil #Hell
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 the meaning itself".
-- Joanne Greenberg

#Caring #Feelings #Needs
...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

#Rain #Reality #Agony
The rose-garden world of perfection is a lie and a bore too!
-- Joanne Greenberg

#Lying #Garden #Rose
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

#Hate #Compassion #Joy
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

#Sorry #Crazy #Bitterness
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

#Practice #Waiting #Way
At least being nuts is being somewhere.
-- Joanne Greenberg

#Nuts
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

#Craziness #Faster
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

#Law #Soul #Mind
Sometimes the world is so much sicker than the inmates of its institutions.
-- Joanne Greenberg

#World #Inmates #Sometimes
If I want to die, what am I saving myself for?
-- Joanne Greenberg

#Suicidal #Saving #Want
Worrying is one of my few forms of prayer.
-- Joanne Greenberg

#Prayer #Worry #Form

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