Quotes from The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness

288 pages

Rating: (6.5K votes)


“I didn’t know how to communicate my suffering to anyone else. My anger was returning. I was screaming for help, but the language I was speaking no one seemed to understand. (183)”
― quote from The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness


“When I was up she taught me to recognize the feeling and savor it. “Remember how good you feel now,” she said. “There will be times later on when everything will seem bleak. I don’t want to minimize the grim and harsh times. I know how bad you feel then. But they won’t last forever. Capture the good moments,” she said. (219)”
― quote from The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness


“Even though the Voices were far more intense in the hospital than before, in some ways they were less frightening. When I was in high school and college, they had sneaked up on me, blasting out of the airwaves almost without warning. By now, they had become almost familiar. I hated them. I suffered from them. But they seemed almost a normal part of living. I knew them. I understood them and they understood me. (96)”
― quote from The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness


“If you decide you have to kill yourself,” he said, “in the last second before you act, picture my face. Listen to me giving you one last plea not to do it. And know that someone really cares.” (228)”
― quote from The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness


“I felt hopeless. I was never going to get better. All I was doing was spending time that was really wasted since I was ultimately going to get done what had to be done. Put your finger in a bucket of water and pull it out. The hole left is how much I’d be missed. Killing myself was my job, my responsibility. (131)”
― quote from The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness



“A long time ago I realized that, as psychiatrists, we had to have a healthy respect for our own humanness, and our own smallness in the face of what we were dealing with. If a person got better, we could appreciate that we had done a good job, but we also needed to realize that God – or luck – was on our side. If the person got worse and had to go to a state hospital, we had to keep ourselves from feeling that we hadn’t done enough. For the truth is, we were powerless in so many of these situations. We did what we could, but sometimes the illness was just bigger than we were. (233)”
― quote from The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness


“Over and over I had to reassure her. “You hate me,” she would say. “Lori, I don’t hate you. I love you.” Finally it began to dawn on me. When she challenged me like that, she wasn’t making a statement. She was asking a question. And she needed to hear the answer. She needed to hear that I still accepted her. She needed to hear that I still cared for her. Over and over again she needed to hear me tell her that I loved her. (117)”
― quote from The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness


Popular quotes

“You said you see patterns,” Lexi said. “What did you mean by that?”
“The day my mother died, I felt the wind on my face and I looked up at the clouds. I could see this amazing pattern forming, always moving, but immediately I knew something was very wrong. It was there, right in front of me. Who sees forecasts of danger or death in clouds?” Airiana pressed her fingers to her eyes. She had the beginnings of a wicked headache.
“You do, obviously,” Lissa said.

-Lexi, Airiana, & Lissa”
― Christine Feehan, quote from Air Bound


“The sign that you have this virtue is patience, and impatience the sign that you have it not, and you will find that this is indeed so, when I speak to you further concerning this virtue.”
― Catherine of Siena, quote from The Dialogue of Saint Catherine of Siena


“Romance isn’t about proving to someone you love them with flowers and greeting cards and chocolate. Or even a lock on a fence. It’s a daily reminder. It’s saying, I choose you. Today and every day.”
― Kristen Proby, quote from Forever with Me


“It’s a pity you are a torturer,” Ultan said. “You might have been a philosopher.”
― Gene Wolfe, quote from Shadow and Claw


“By the twelfth day of his fast, Raju himself has become a tourist attraction. Before an enormous crowd and an American television crew, the starving man is helped down to the drought-stricken river to pray:”
― R.K. Narayan, quote from The Guide


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