Quotes from Mark Vonnegut

A happy person with decent self-esteem wouldn't bother to have credentials as good as mine.

None of us are entirely well, and none of us are irrecoverably sick. At my best I have islands of being sick. At my worst I had islands of being well. Except for a reluctance to give up on myself there isn't anything I can claim credit for that helped me recover from my breaks. Even that doesn't count. You either have or don't have a reluctance to give up on yourself. It helps a lot if others don't give up on you. Had

The road to medical school started with a job mowing lawns I was far from sure I could handle.

The Doc. Virginia and Simon had told me that Dr. Dale was my doctor. I have a fuzzy recollection of walking up to some doctor-looking person and being totally absorbed by his gold tie clip. I suspected it was the button to end the world so I didn't touch it. I'm pretty sure it was Dr. Dale. I don't know who else would be so tasteless as to walk around a mental hospital wearing the button to end the world.

Having rationally decided to become less rational, we hoped to find new, meaningful, exciting, useful truths. Folk

Short time here, long time gone. The reason to try to be good, smart, kind, and on the side of angels is because it's more fun and because there really aren't any angels.

At the time I would have endorsed the radical notions of R. D. Laing that insanity was a sane reaction to an insane society. Leaving the insane society to set up an independent self-sufficient commune seemed like a very sensible noble brave thing to do—plus it figured to be good for my mental health. Had I gone crazy in Boston or New York I would have blamed my culture and society without a second thought. The arguments were all packed, polished, and ready to fly.

I'm subject to occasional theological nightmares. The one that leaves me in a cold sweat every time is, I arrive at the pearly gates and the first thing I'm asked is where I went to college.

Looking at mental health problems the same way we look at other medical problems is factually correct—the best bet for reducing the disabling symptoms and the only way to lessen the stigma and blame that traditionally double or triple the pain.

Medical care has become a lot of crust and precious little pie.

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 paint, the typo, the dissonance, give you. Without art you're stuck with yourself as you are and life as you think life is.

chapter 2 Raised by Wolves The biggest gift of being unambiguously mentally ill is the time I've saved myself trying to be normal.

In my more lucid moments I realized that insanity was a fairly reasonable explanation for what was happening to me. The problem was that it wasn't useful information. Realizing I was crazy didn't make the crazy stuff stop happening. Nor did it give me any clues about what I should do next.

For me to have sat around calling the crazy stuff crazy would have been the most wasteful, unimaginative thing I could have done. There were so many much better things to do with it.

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 paint, the typo, the dissonance, give you. Without art you're stuck with yourself as you are and life as you think life is.

Maybe just being open to things being connected made us see more. Now I shudder whenever I find that sort of connectedness creeping into my life.

I thought I was white bread.

The place I felt most welcome and comfortable was AA meetings, even though there was a sticky-sweet optimism there I found insufferable.

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.

If I had had a drinking problem, I would have hidden it, but I didn't so I didn't.

What keeps the drinker drinking is the certainty that she can stop whenever she wants. It never would have occurred to me that stopping the pathetic little bit of drinking I did would have mattered.

His romance and charm lay in how well he did with what might have been and how gracefully he accepted what was.

Stigma" is a dressed-up word for ignorance and prejudice.

Why is there so much meaning when a mind breaks? Why isn't it all just static and nonsense?