(About shock treatments:) Again and again they took to me the square, lighted room, and increasing the voltage, sent juice to the center of me where poetry once stirred.

(About shock treatments:) We would go together, victims of our genes, our dreams, our hurts, and tough stubborn angers, casualties of a vast clean-up campaign. They would burn it out of us-whatever it was that made us all possessed, or heavy with the pain of being, or odd beyond endurance, or "sick." They would set fire to our heads, convulse our poor bodies, befog the brain that screamed and wept and would not interpret proverbs.

... I learned, as time wore on, that you had no choice but to conform eventually.

When you lived in the closed world of a mental hospital, you learn quickly not to take any pleasure for granted. You learn the skills of survival, and the rules of reward and punishment, and the high comic art of playing the fool.

The bottom of my life had been whisked away; I was falling, falling again. Where would I land?