Quotes from Jonathan Rosen

Starlets were always turning up dead in people's pools. They fished them out like goldfish. Nobody seemed to find it unusual that so many young, beautiful women wanted to die.

Most people don't want to die, but they don't want to live either. I am speaking about men now as much as women. They look for a third way, but there is no third way.

It means that the things that make us human often make us ill.

It's the side-by-side culture of the Talmud I like so much. 'On the one hand' and 'on the other hand' is frustrating for people seeking absolute faith, but for me it gives religion an ambidextrous quality that suits my temperament.

The Talmud tells a story about a great Rabbi who is dying, he has become a goses , but he cannot die because outside all his students are praying for him to live and this is distracting to his soul. His maidservant climbs to the roof of the hut where the Rabbi is dying and hurls a clay vessel to the ground. The sound diverts the students, who stop praying. In that moment, the Rabbi dies and his soul goes to heaven. The servant, too, the Talmud says, is guaranteed her place in the world to come.

Hollywood culture is a universal culture now. Everyone wants to step out of life and into the flat perfections of a movie screen. My own wish to drown was not so different from the desire those girls had to leave their real lives behind, to recieve new names and wardrobes and perfectly scripted lines.

Every generation is born innocent, and if that is bad for history, it is nevertheless necessary for

Try to be one of the people," said Henry James, "on whom nothing is lost." As a writer I considered myself observant, but how much was lost on me! Birds may be everywhere, but they also—lucky for them—inhabit an alternate universe, invisible to most of us until we learn to look in a new way. And even after I had been shown them, aspects kept eluding me.

Every generation is born innocent, and if that is bad for history, it is nevertheless necessary for life.

he'd recited the words that Adam speaks to Eve after she's eaten the forbidden fruit. Adam is still unfallen but determined to share Eve's fate.

Balzac's assertion, which my mother also quoted, that behind every great fortune was a great crime

all the reasons people with serious mental illness were ignored: they don't contribute to society, they don't make money, they're difficult, they're disenfranchised—who's going to pay attention to them? Until something tragic happens; then it's a nightmare. This was the nightmare.

a comprehensive system of mental-health services, including support for parents with sick adult children who refuse treatment, doesn't exist

He did not believe that the one thousand deaths caused each year by people with unmedicated schizophrenia should indict the vast population of those suffering from the illness, but he did want to prevent those deaths, a greater number of suicides, a growing number of mentally ill homeless people, and a prison population swelled by people suffering from mental illness who received no care.

It's true I didn't love the job, but I did want the money. If I was too incompetent for ordinary work, I would have to do something extraordinary or face destruction.

I cling to this notion now because it is what allows me to feel a connection to a vast body of knowledge of which I am not master, much as I am able to live in a society bursting with information that I will never wholly comprehend. I take comfort from a lesson that seems implicit in the Talmud itself, which is that not knowing Torah is part of the lesson of Torah.

All mankind is of one author and is one volume," John Donne wrote in one of his most beautiful meditations. "When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated.

The beauty of postmodernism was that it erased the world with one hand while rewriting it with the other, allowing you to inherit the authority you discredited like a spoil of war.

Call it the Darwinian contradiction. We come down from the trees and walk upright and what do we get for it? Foot pain! Bad backs! We cease living sexual lives regulated by mating seasons, by hormonal tides or the rotation of the earth and what happens? Marital misery. Divorce. Rape.

Madness calls literature's bluff by going beyond it and falling short of it at the same time.

If the key to reducing stigma is the normalization of mental illness as a disease and not a character flaw, then surely a discussion of symptoms, treatments, and interventions is part of the process.

Michael had gotten sick amid the ruins of a demolished system. The wall dividing many things—including the asylum and the street—had come down while we were growing up. So had the distinction between severe mental illness and what Freud called "the psychopathology of everyday life.

The things that make us human often make us ill.