Asylum Quotes

“Don't let the rain drive you to the wrong shelter; the shade can turn out to be your protector and also your destroyer, and sometimes the rain is the perfect protector from the rain.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“God judges men from the inside out; men judge men from the outside in. Perhaps to God, an extreme mental patient is doing quite well in going a month without murder, for he fought his chemical imbalance and succeeded; oppositely, perhaps the healthy, able and stable man who has never murdered in his life yet went a lifetime consciously, willingly never loving anyone but himself may then be subject to harsher judgment than the extreme mental patient. It might be so that God will stand for the weak and question the strong.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“HOME

no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well

your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.

no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.

you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied

no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one skin would be tough enough

the
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
niggers with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess ours up
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off

or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hunger
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important

no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here”
― Warsan Shire

“He mouths something. Six words. Six words that seem too impossible to be true. Six words that bleed hope into my soul. Six words. “You’re not crazy. I love you.”
― lauren hammond

“Here I want to stress that perception of losing one’s mind is based on culturally derived and socially ingrained stereotypes as to the significance of symptoms such as hearing voices, losing temporal and spatial orientation, and sensing that one is being followed, and that many of the most spectacular and convincing of these symptoms in some instances psychiatrically signify merely a temporary emotional upset in a stressful situation, however terrifying to the person at the time. Similarly, the anxiety consequent upon this perception of oneself, and the strategies devised to reduce this anxiety, are not a product of abnormal psychology, but would be exhibited by any person socialized into our culture who came to conceive of himself as someone losing his mind.”
― Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates

“It seemed to me I was living in an insane asylum of my own making. I went about with all these fantastic figures: centaurs, nymphs, satyrs, gods and goddesses, as though they were patients and I was analyzing them. I read a Greek or Negro myth as if a lunatic were telling me his anamnesis.”
― C.G. Jung, Analytical Psychology: Its Theory and Practice

“You knew then that this was not any kind of hospital that cured, but a hospital that held, that kept their patients away from the rest of the world, a kind of ark that floated along full of life, but not participating in life.... These people no longer made progress.”
― Anne Spollen, The Shape of Water

“Everybody was stark naked, day and night. Luckily it was hot. They let me wear socks.”
― Henri Charrière, Papillon

“Man-made borders shouldn't matter more than people.”
― Romina Garber, Lobizona

“Insane asylum - a place where insanity is made.”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear

“I know you think what we have is sordid. Perhaps it is. Perhaps neither of us knows how to love properly and this is our twisted way of showing that we care. Or perhaps we should both be committed to an asylum”
― C.J. Archer, Of Fate and Phantoms

“They had engaged in what could not be called treatment or even discussion, but open combat, the two of them a microcosm of the great war raging in the far distance: one side that desired autonomy, and the other that took independence as a sign of madness.”
― Kathy Hepinstall, Blue Asylum

“The eyes and the faces all turned themselves towards me, and guiding myself by them, as by a magical thread, I stepped into the room.”
― Sylvia Plath

“He belongs to the class of simple-hearted, practical, and dull-witted people, prompt in carrying out orders, who like discipline better than anything in the world, and so are convinced that it is their duty to beat people.”
― Anton Chekhov, Ward No. 6 and Other Stories

“...for happy, thrice happy, shall they be pronounced hereafter, who have contributed anything, who have performed the meanest Office, in erecting this Stupendious Fabrick of Freedom & Empire, on the broad basis of Independency; who have assisted in protecting the rights of human nature, and establishing an Asylum for the poor, and oppressed of all nations and Religions.”
― George Washington

“She poisoned my life with a secret.
One that must be guarded with lies.
But I read once in a poetry book that a lie is but the truth in masquerade, so I am not afraid, for this past year I have survived by subterfuge and pretence.”
― Marjorie DeLuca, The Savage Instinct

“I am a man in death. I am not God. I am not man. I am a beast and a predator. I want to make love to prostitutes. I want to live like an unnecessary man.
I know that God wants this, and therefore I will live that way. I will live that way until He stops me. I will gamble on the Stock Exchange because I want to do so at other people's expense. I am an evil man. I do not love anyone. I wish harm to everyone and good to myself. I am an egoist. I am not God. I am a beast, a predator. I will practice masturbation and spiritualism. I will eat everyone I can get hold of. I will stop at nothing. I will make love to my wife's mother and my child. I will weep, but I will do everything God commands me to. I know that everyone will be afraid of me and will commit me to a lunatic asylum. But I don't care. I am not afraid of anything. I want death. I will blow my brains out if God wants it.”
― Vaslav Nijinsky, The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky: Unexpurgated Edition

“Once upon a time in faraway land, a young prince lived in a shining castle...

It was a very good story.
It often entertained the women who lay in her black hole of a room, manacled to a hard, cold bed.
She had enjoyed its repetition in her mind for years. Sometimes she remembered bits differently: sometimes the rose was pink as a sunset by the sea. But that never resonated as well as red as blood....”
― Liz Braswell, As Old as Time

“She had been concerned before about the lack of treatment for those who were genuinely mentally ill. But this course he had now prescribed went the other way. As one patient put it, most of the doctors that are employed in lunatic asylums do much more to aggravate the disease than they do to cure it.”
― Kate Moore, The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear

“I feed her a spoonful of glass. By morning, she will be a window.”
― Aria Aber, Hard Damage

“[W]ithin a generation, the Roman order was shaken to its core and Roman armies, as one contemporary put it, 'vanished like shadows'. In 376, a large band of Gothic refugees arrived at the Empire's Danube frontier, asking for asylum. In a complete break with established Roman policy, they were allowed in, unsubdued. They revolted, and within two years had defeated and killed the emperor Valens - the one who had received them - along with two-thirds of his army[.]”
― Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians

“It was past eight on a Friday night, so calling the Homeward to speak to Dr. Casbus was out of the question. The head nurse would never bother him this late.
A sly idea struck me. Just because I couldn’t call the doctor, didn’t mean I couldn’t go see him in person. I’d gone to the Homeward at night before. On those nights when I’d been afraid for my mother, afraid she’d be scared, or missing me, or they would be hurting her with their treatments.
The head nurse, Mrs. Huds didn’t like it, but Casbus always showed up to save me from her lecture on rules. He didn’t let me have a room to stay in—it wasn’t the Holiday Inn, but he’d let me stay long enough to dial down my fears a notch or two.
And sometimes, I learned more about myself, like the last after-hours session, when Casbus had explained why I had holes in my memories.”
― Cheryl R. Cowtan, Girl Desecrated: Vampires, Asylums and Highlanders 1984

“Doctor Andrey Yefimitch, of whom we shall have more to say hereafter, prescribed cold compresses on his head and laurel drops, shook his head, and went away, telling the landlady he should not come again, as one should not interfere with people who are going out of their minds.”
― Anton Chekhov

“A refugee is someone who was forcefully taken out of their time and place. They were then placed in another time and another place that insist on dehumanizing them. It is a tragedy. The ultimate paradox and irony of this tragedy is that, in many cases, those who caused their displacement and those who hate them in their newfound ‘homes’ in exile are the same people! In this way, they leave no place for a refugee to feel at home or even alive.”
― Louis Yako

“At times the cooks express a small amount of generosity and pour half a glass of milk for every prisoner.”
― Behrouz Boochani, No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison

“Maybe I’m going crazy, but I swore I’d never go there again. I see the edge of the pond and feel the dangling willow branches tangle in my hair as if it were yesterday. The water pulls at me like Velcro, clinging, drawing me in. Why can I remember that from so many years ago and not where I put the bread today? I know one thing: They will not put me in an asylum for the mentally deranged. Not again.”
― Jenny Knipfer, Under the Weeping Willow

“Onanism was hardly murder. Masturbation did not fall within the category of mania but instead was thought to cause mental and physical deterioration. I’d witnessed attempted cures involving mechanical restraints, surgery and moral discipline, most often delivered in clinical settings. None of which had probably been offered Mr. Tarski. I’d entered the cell expecting a monster. I left having met a simpleton. Tarski was not the Shoreditch killer.”
― Thea Sutton, The Women of Blackmouth Street

“The recipe for keeping safe was simple;
don't get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
― Peter Clifford Nichols, The Word of Bob: an AI Minecraft Villager

“He shouldn’t be here,” my father said, tearful and breathlessly agitated, shortly before drifting off to sleep that night. “If our country were ever given a chance and allowed to be a country like any other, none of us would live or die here.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I'm Dying

“If you run away without looking back when you see a danger, you will only save yourself, not your honour! The same thing will happen if you run away when there are dangerous developments in your country!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan