Evelyn Waugh Quotes

Prison's a walk in the park compared with being sectioned, mate, it really is.

I was never in a mental institution for a long time. I was in psych wards.

But here let me say one thing: From the moment I entered the insane ward on the Island, I made no attempt to keep up the assumed role of insanity.

The insane asylum on Blackwell’s Island is a human rat-trap. It is easy to get in, but once there it is impossible to get out.

Louisiana is a fresh-air mental asylum.

I later spent... five to eight months in hospitals in New Jersey, always on an involuntary basis, and always attempting a legal argument for release.

So I had a choice between going to a jail or going to a bughouse like a nice young middle-class student. So I chose to go to a very polite mental hospital. When I left eight months later, they said, 'You were never psychotic. You were just an average neurotic.'

You seem to forget, Miss Flinn, that this is an institution for the insane.

If you like using CVS, you should be in some kind of mental institution or somewhere else.

A first visit to a madhouse is always a shock.

One of the reasons the doctors gave for hospitalizing me against my will was that I was 'gravely disabled.' To support this view, they wrote in my chart that I was unable to do my Yale Law School homework. I wondered what that meant about much of the rest of New Haven.

When I was in college, I worked at a state hospital that was a dumping ground for all manner of the criminally insane and 'mental defectives' as they called them back then. It was a horrible place, like Arkham, mostly in terms of total neglect of the inmates, so I wanted to write an Arkham story.

Growing up, I was in and out of trouble in group homes and other institutions, and when I was 14, I was locked up in a psychiatric hospital for a number of months for behavioral problems.

Our parents came home one day and heard us, and they thought it was the radio, but our grandfather told them it was us.

All I'm doing is rearranging the curtains in the insane asylum.

I have one thing to say about the mental asylum. I've romanticized two things in my life, and both have fallen short. One is being in a mental asylum. Really, really not as fun as you think it is.

Psychiatry is probably the single most destructive force that has affected American Society within the last fifty years.

There's nothing better than being in an asylum, if you're going to have a bunch of crazy people in an asylum, and they're all beautiful Hollywood actresses.

I'm something like the old soak who never knew whether his wife told him to take one drink and come home at 12, or take 12 and come home at one.

But, gee," the other nurse says, "what on earth would MAKE a man want to do something like disrupt the ward for, Miss Ratched? What possible motive...?""You seem to forget, MISS Flinn, that this is an institution for the insane.

You could also "request" to be locked into the seclusion room. Not many people made that request. You had to "request" to get out too. A nurse would look through the chicken wire and decide if you were ready to come out. Somewhat like looking at a cake through the glass of the oven door.

If someone were to say seriously, "I'm divine," she'd have to be locked up. There are lots of people in mental institutions going around saying "I'm God." But because I'm funny about it, they haven't locked me up yet. And I don't give myself airs, either.

There is nothing like an insane asylum for gently incubating death.

The present blitz about drugs - I think it looks very much like how we treated insane people 100 years ago -- throw them in the cage - as if that's the whole answer. And it's not the whole answer.

Your ideal possession candidate's a thirteen-year-old recently orphaned schizophrenic girl three days away from her period on her way to see the shrink with whom she's romantically besotted.