Quotes from Mark Vonnegut

If you want to pick out the people who go crazy from time to time in my family, find the ones in the photos who look ten or more years younger than they actually are. Maybe it's because we laugh and cry a lot and have a hard time figuring out what to do next. It keeps the facial muscles toned up.

My father gave me the gifts of being able to pay attention to my inner narration no matter how tedious the damn thing could be at times and the knowledge that creating something, be it music or a painting or a poem or a short story, was a way out of wherever you were and a way to find out what the hell happens next and not have it be just the same old thing.

best parents are poor people who have a little bit of money and rich people who have had a little bit of poverty.

There's no tense but the present. The fantastic presents itself as fact.

At meetings I've heard people say proudly that they have no original thoughts, that everything they say they learned in meetings or from reading the Big Book. Wouldn't that be nice? I have so many original thoughts I have to take medication for it.

All that fancy wine in my basement was nothing but alcohol. What was I going to do about the couple thousand dollars' worth of Bordeaux futures I owned? I cried tears of joy for having been such an idiot and having things now be so clear. It was also an enormous relief that, since I knew what the problem was, I wouldn't have to do anything degrading like go to a hospital.

A surgeon in charge of my surgery rotation said that he knew who I was but that he was going to treat me as if I was normal. I sincerely thanked him and told him I would try to act that way.

They started using pink in the OR under the mistaken assumption that doctors wouldn't want to be seen in pink scrubs in the cafeteria or elsewhere. Very shortly after the introduction of "OR only" pink scrubs, pink scrubs were everywhere, including neighborhood basketball courts. If everyone wore surgical scrubs instead of regular clothing, we could save trillions of dollars. There is no other way to fully clothe a person for less than ten dollars.

Back in Hollywood Hospital, there were no scrubs. The doctors were very well dressed, and the patients were in pajamas. The doctor in charge of the whole place wore baby-blue alligator shoes, drove a light blue '59 Cadillac convertible, and wore what I was sure was the button to end the world as a tie clip.

The doctor's job was to shut up long enough to let the patient be the most important person in the room, because she was. There was an unforced and absolutely real respect for people just because they were people. And we, as doctors, were their servants. For all the things that felt wrong, that felt right. If you weren't an idealist, why would you go to medical school?

One of his favorite jokes was about a guy who was smuggling wheelbarrows. Every day for years and years a customs agent carefully searched through this guy's wheelbarrow. Finally, when he was about to retire, the customs agent asked the guy, We've become friends. I've searched your wheelbarrow every day for many years. What is it you're muggling? My friend, I am smuggling wheelbarrows.

recovery from mental illness depended on the goodness, mercy, and rational behavior of others, we'd all be screwed. Peace of mind is inversely proportional to expectations. It's possible within any given moment of any given day to choose between self and sickness.

Burnout is what happens to doctors and nurses who feel powerless and are unable to help patients.

It's the feeling that one is a cog in a machine that doesn't care. Burnout makes people angry, depressed, and unable to do or enjoy doing the work of patient care. Burnout is loneliness, isolation, and an invitation to addiction, alcoholism, and other forms of self-harm.

Being a good conversationalist is really what a liberal arts education is all about.

Chance favors the prepared mind. —Louis Pasteur

Treating sickness as a business opportunity has just about killed the joy of healing, the very reason most doctors and nurses wanted to go into it in the first place.

I was back to being polite, the well-tempered paranoid. I didn't have much 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 any urgency or anything to be gained by not being polite, the way there had been before. So I was polite. There was time.

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?

The reason creativity and craziness go together is that if you're just plain crazy without being able to sing or dance or write good poems, no one is going to want to have babies with you. Your genes will fall by the wayside. Who but a brazen crazy person would go one-on-one with blank paper or canvas armed with nothing but ideas?

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. What is a myth is that we are mostly mentally well most of the time.

The cost of not caring for the mentally ill dwarfs the cost of caring.

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.

I didn't like the '60s because it was too important what people who had nothing to do with the war thought about it.