"My only hope was to be polite."
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Quote collection
Mark Vonnegut quotes (page 2 of 2)
36 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Once you've been talked to by voices, it's not possible to go back to a world where talking voices is not possible."
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"My mother, who was radiant, young, and beautiful even as she lay dying, heard voices and saw visions, but she always managed to make friends with them and was much too charming to hospitalize even at her craziest."
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"Well, I thought, last night I paid my dues. I faced death. Now I can stay."
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"I didn't like the '60s because it was too important what people who had nothing to do with the war thought about it."
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"I take care of military families. Their sacrifices are very real."
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"I saw a study the other day showing that some atypical anti-psychotic was at least as good as mood stabilizers in preventing suicide. It's a very good thing to decrease suicide but we should care at least a little if I'm not killing myself because I feel better or if I just can't remember where I put the damn gun."
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"When I talk to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) and other patient support groups, I take questions at the end. At one talk I was asked, "What's the difference between yourself and someone without mental illness?". At another talk I was asked, "How do you make the voices be not so mean?". I wish I knew."
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"Life for the unwell is discontinuous and unpredictable. Things just come out of nowhere. People try but mostly do a lousy job of taking care of you."
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"What occurs to people when they read Kurt [Vonnegut] is that things are much more up for grabs than they thought they were. The world is a slightly different place just because they read a damn book. Imagine that."
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"Fear that I was very different from everyone else. Fear that deep down inside I was a shallow fraud, that after the revolution or after Jesus came down to straighten everything out, everyone from hippies to hard-hats would unfold and blossom into the beautiful people they were while I would remain a gnarled little wart in the corner, oozing bile and giving off putrid smells."
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"And if you're lucky enough to survive going crazy and get back to the point where you can pass for normal, it builds a question into the rest of your life. You have to forgive people for wondering, 'How all right can he be?'"
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"Are people who have been crazy held to unfair standards?Of course, but it's not in your best interest to complain. If you're paranoid and people are looking at you funny it's best to let it pass. Psychotic people have an uncanny knack for making their own worst dreams come true. Depressing things happen to depressed people way beyond what you would expect from random distribution."
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"Most adults have forgotten what they had to do to survive childhood."
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"I don't think the people today who start hearing voices, stop eating and sleeping, and run amuck are likely to get good treatment. Having more knowledge, better diagnostic capabilities, better medications with fewer side effects, can't make up for the fact that most patients are being treated by doctors, therapists, and hospitals, who are operating under constraints and incentives that reward non-treatment, non-hospitalization, non-therapy, non-follow-up, non-care. Lost to follow-up is the best outcome a health insurer can hope for."
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"None of us are entirely well, and none of us are irrecoverably sick."
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