Once in these circumstances (in a psychiatric ward), the policy is "insane" until proven "sane," even though legally one is entitled to a trial before being judged.

The main game ... consists of finding what the doctor wants us to say or do so that he will be pleased with us and release us from the hospital.

Two weeks can be a long time to lay on one's back and stare at a light bulb that never goes out.

We (mental patients) were simply treated so mindlessly, so animalistically, that no attempt was made to communicate to us in any way why we were there or where we were going or what was about to happen to us. Nothing was explained to us.

The present state of insane persons, confined within this commonwealth, in cages, closets, cellars, stalls, pens! Chained, naked, beaten with rods, and lashed into obedience.

... every asylum is the question mark in the sentence of civilization.

(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.