Quotes from Mark Vonnegut

Once you've been talked to by voices, it's not possible to go back to a world where talking voices is not possible.

My only hope was to be polite.

I take care of military families. Their sacrifices are very real.

I'm not an expert on the Middle East or terrorism or the use of military force or politics. It's all I can do to know a little bit about how to help people raise their kids and what to do when they get sick. When a war happens, I just hope it gets over with quickly so that how we take care of children becomes more important again.

As well as being one of the worst things that can happen to a human being, schizophrenia can also be one of the richest learning and humanizing experiences life offers.

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.

The first meeting I really remember with the good doctor was when I was starting to be able to speak English again and making a brave attempt to regain some of my dignity. Trying to be very sane, I went up to him and asked if he was my doctor. He said he didn't think so. You're Dr. Dale, aren't you? Why, Mark, of course. I didn't recognize you with clothes on. He had a talent for saying just the right thing.

Put on all the armor of the Lord. Not just the pretty stuff.

If you believe that the dollars made by the pharmaceutical industry are plowed back into research that leads to better and better medications, you probably believe in the tooth fairy as well.

Extroverts are amazed and baffled by how much some introverts get done and assume that they, the extroverts, are somehow actually responsible.

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.

I'm willing to make sense as soon as the rest of the world does.

I was back to being polite, the well-tempered paranoid. I didn't have much of a choice. If I wasn't polite, they could stick me with those needles or put me back in that little room or take away my visitor privileges or any number of other things. Besides, there didn't seem to be any urgency or anything to be gained by not being polite, the way there had been before. So I was polite. There was time.

Rarely are there big heroic choices that will settle matters once and for all. The smallest positive step is probably the right one. Try not to argue. If you're right, you don't need to argue. If you're wrong, it won't help. If you're okay, things will be okay. If you're not okay, nothing else matters.

My parents were told by the principal of West Barnstable Elementary School and my teacher that I was a bright boy whose spelling was in the retarded range and whose handwriting was the worst they'd ever seen. I find it embarrassing that I spell so badly. I will do almost anything to avoid being embarrassed, but no effort either on my part or on the part of any teacher has ever dented my utter bafflement when it comes to choosing which letters to put down, how many, and in what order.

But my biggest joy and best education and proudest achievement has been being able to show up for work and life and not cause too much trouble a day at a time in spite of my hysterical, somewhat dramatic, nature.

Art is lunging forward without certainty about where you are going or how to get there, being open to and dependent on what luck, the pain, the typo, the dissonance, give you. Without art you're stuck with yourself as you are and life as you think life is.

There are no people anywhere who don't have some mental illness. It all depends on where you set the bar and how hard you look.

The other day a patient told me that he had gotten into what was a very good college. 'It's not Harvard,' he said. 'Harvard's not Harvard either,' I answered.

Without writers fooling themselves about what their books might accomplish there would be no books at all.

It's probably possible to gain humility by means other than repeated humiliation, but repeated humiliation works very well.

Until we come up with an unequivocal blood test or the equivalent, we're all blowing smoke and don't know if what we call schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are one disorder or a dozen.

My father was a proudly antisocial man who spent most of his time at a typewriter, reflecting negatively on his neighbors and society, throwing in things like Goddamn it, you've got to be kind. The emphasis was on the Goddamn it. He was proud of the fact that I had no friends

I can pass for normal most of the time, but I understand perfectly why some of my autistic patients scream and flap their arms -- it's to frighten off extroverts.