Quotes from Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“You're never ready for what you have to do. You just do it. That makes you ready.”
― quote from Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“Isolated, she managed somehow to feel free—albeit with a freedom that made her want to smash a hole in the very center of the universe.”
― quote from Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“There is no past. Past is present when you carry it with you.”
― quote from Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“I want somebody to love, and I want somebody to love me. And nobody ever will. And that's why it hurts. Because it makes a difference. And when nobody cares, it makes you all mad inside and it makes you want to say things, tear up things, break things, get through the glass.”
― quote from Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“I’m not fit to occupy space. Excuse me for living.”
― quote from Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“I have to force myself even to move my eyeballs. It's so easy just to stare.”
― quote from Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“Theirs was the eternal youth of an alternating self, a youth with the constant although unfulfilled promise of growing up”
― quote from Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“The anger. The terror. The feeling of entrapment. the profound distrust of people.The wistful, plaintive conviction that a window, a thing, was more important than she. These feelings and attitudes, expressed in the course of this hour, were symptoms of some profound disturbance.”
― quote from Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“The neurologist had dismissed her case after a single visit, handing out an easy nostrum by telling her father that if she continued to write poetry, she would be all right.”
― quote from Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“Vicky became more serious and her tone more reflective as she remarked, "Life has so much pain that one needs a catharsis. I don't mean escape. You don't escape in books. On the contrary, they help you to realize yourself more fully. Mon Dieu, I'm glad I have them. When I find myself in a situation in which I'd rather not be - because of the perculiar circumstances of my life - I have this outlet. You may think me tres superieure but I'm not really, I am just what I am and live the way I like.”
― quote from Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“She'd abandoned the animal she loved as she herself had been abandoned repeatedly in the past by people who had claimed to love her.”
― quote from Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“It all made sense — terrible sense. The panic she had experienced in the warehouse district because of not knowing what had happened had been superseded at the newsstand by the even greater panic of partial knowledge. And now the torment of partly knowing had yielded to the infinitely greater terror of knowing precisely”
― quote from Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“I realized how trapped I was by all the talk of the end of the world.”
― quote from Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“God fearing and man hating. Sugar sugar. There was so much sugar in the way they pretended to treat each other that I suffered from diabetes of the soul.”
― quote from Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“Willard married his father in female form.”
― quote from Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“You knock yourself down. You don't think much of yourself. That's an uncomfortable feeling. So you project it on others and say, 'They don't like me.”
― quote from Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“After writing the letter Sybil lost almost two days. "Coming to," she stumbled across what she had written just before she had dissociated and wrote to Dr. Wilbur as follows: It's just so hard to have to feel, believe, and admit that I do not have conscious control over my selves. It is so much more threatening to have something out of hand than to believe that at any moment I can stop (I started to say "This foolishness") any time I need to. When I wrote the previous letter, I had made up my mind I would show you how I could be very composed and cool and not need to ask you to listen to me nor to explain anything to me nor need any help. By telling you that all this about the multiple personalities was not really true I could show, or so I thought, that I did not need you. Well, it would be easier if it were put on. But the only ruse of which I'm guilty is to have pretended for so long before coming to you that nothing was wrong. Pretending that the personalities did not exist has now caused me to lose about two days.”
― quote from Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“It is so much more threatening to have something out of hand than to believe that at any moment I can stop (I started to say "This foolishness") any time I need to.”
― quote from Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“It is so much more threatening to have something out of hand than to believe that at any moment I can stop (I started to say "This foolishness") any time I need to. When I wrote the previous letter, I had made up my mind I would show you how I could be very composed and cool and not need to ask you to listen to me nor to explain anything to me nor need any help. By telling you that all this about the multiple personalities was not really true but just put on, I could show, or so I thought, that I did not need you. Well, it would have been easier if it were put on. But the only ruse of which I'm guilty is to have pretended for so long before coming to you that nothing was wrong. Pretending that the personalities did not exist has now caused me to lose about two days.
Three weeks later Sybil reaffirmed her belief in the existence of her other selves in a letter to Miss Updyke, the school nurse of undergraduate days.”
― quote from Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“When I wrote the previous letter, I had made up my mind I would show you how I could be very composed and cool and not need to ask you to listen to me nor to explain anything to me nor need any help. By telling you that all this about the multiple personalities was not really true but just put on, I could show, or so I thought, that I did not need you. Well, it would have been easier if it were put on.”
― quote from Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“Well, it would have been easier if it were put on. But the only ruse of which I'm guilty is to have pretended for so long before coming to you that nothing was wrong. Pretending that the personalities did not exist has now caused me to lose about two days.”
― quote from Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

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“Normal people open their doors. People who have something to hide keep them closed.”
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“Five months after Zoran's disappearance, his wife gave birth to a girl. The mother was unable to nurse the child. The city was being shelled continuously. There were severe food shortages. Infants, like the infirm and the elderly, were dying in droves. The family gave the baby tea for five days, but she began to fade.

"She was dying," Rosa Sorak said. "It was breaking our hearts."

Fejzić, meanwhile, was keeping his cow in a field on the eastern edge of Goražde, milking it at night to avoid being hit by Serbian snipers.

"On the fifth day, just before dawn, we heard someone at the door," said Rosa Sorak. "It was Fadil Fejzić in his black rubber boots. He handed up half a liter of milk he came the next morning, and the morning after that, and after that. Other families on the street began to insult him. They told him to give his milk to Muslims, to let the Chetnik children die. He never said a word. He refused our money. He came 442 days, until my daughter-in-law and granddaughter left Goražde for Serbia."

The Soraks eventually left and took over a house that once belonged to a Muslim family in the Serbian-held town of Kopaci. Two miles to the east. They could no longer communicate with Fejzić.

The couple said they grieved daily for their sons. They missed their home. They said they could never forgive those who took Zoran from them. But they also said that despite their anger and loss, they could not listen to other Sebs talking about Muslims, or even recite their own sufferings, without telling of Fejzić and his cow. Here was the power of love. What this illiterate farmer did would color the life of another human being, who might never meet him, long after he was gone, in his act lay an ocean of hope.”
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