30+ Joanne Greenberg Quotes (Empathetic, Thoughtful And Uplifting)

Joanne Greenberg is an American author who is best known for her novel I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. The book, published in 1964, is a semi-autobiographical account of Greenberg's struggle with mental illness. Greenberg has also written several other novels, short stories, and non-fiction works.

Top 10 Joanne Greenberg Quotes

1. The hidden strength is too deep a secret. But in the end...in the end it is our only ally.
2. There is nothing that you can do to me that my own craziness doesn't do to me smarter and faster and better.
3. all children blackmail their parents with their innocence.
4. A nut is someone whose noose broke.
5. The creative strength is good enough and deep enough to bring itself to flower and to grow in spite of this sickness.
6. The horror of the Pit lay in the emergence from it, with the return of her will, her caring, and her feeling of the need for meaning before the return of the meaning itself".
7. The rose-garden world of perfection is a lie and a bore too!
8. Don't cut bangs with a hatchet. Don't do brain surgery with a pickax.
9. To praise one thing is not to damn another.
10. At least being nuts is being somewhere.

Joanne Greenberg Short Quotes

• I have found this to be true, that one sin begets a dozen others.
• What do you do with mother love and mother wit when the babies are grown and gone away?
• What cook can match herself against hunger and memory?
• A humane and authentic book written by another voice from the trenches.
• If I want to die, what am I saving myself for?
• Sometimes the world is so much sicker than the inmates of its institutions.
• Worrying is one of my few forms of prayer.
• Anybody can hear - it takes brains to listen.
• The woman was sane; she accepted the heavy penalties of reality and enjoyed its gifts also.

Joanne Greenberg Famous Quotes And Sayings

The people on the edge of Hell were most afraid of the devil; for those already in hell the devil was only another and no one in particular. — Joanne Greenberg

suicide is a crime - the only crime that, if successful, guarantees that the perpetrator will not be punished for it. This makes it the most serious crime of all. — Joanne Greenberg

...to experience the reality was to suffer a boredom as endless as the illness itself...the boredom of insanity was a great desert, so great that anyone's violence or agony seemed an oasis, and the brief companionship seemed like a rain in the desert that was numbered and counted and remembered long after it was gone. — Joanne Greenberg

suicide is the ultimate 'one-up,' as it were, the accusation that brooks no defense, the argument won at last. — Joanne Greenberg

And if I fight, then for what?""For nothing easy or sweet, and I told you that last year and the year before that. For your own challenge, for your own mistakes and the punishment for them, for your own definition of love and of sanity - a good strong self with which to begin to live. — Joanne Greenberg

I once had a patient who used to practice the most horrible tortures on himself, and when I asked him why he did such things, he said, 'Why before the world does them.' I asked him then, 'Why not wait and see what the world will do?' and he said, 'Don't you see? It always come at last, but this way at least I am master of my own destruction. — Joanne Greenberg

She now knew that the death she feared might not be a physical one, that it could be death of the will, the soul, the mind, the laws, and thus not death, but a perpetual dying. — Joanne Greenberg

I'm sorry I'm young," Deborah answered with a bitterness that was half prose. "We have a right to be as crazy as anyone else." The second part was more a plea, and to her surprise the superbly inhuman fighter smiled softly and said, "Yes ... I suppose that's true, though I never thought of it in those terms before. — Joanne Greenberg

Measure the hate you feel now, and the shame. That quantity is your capacity also to love and to feel joy and to have compassion. — Joanne Greenberg

Money in the hand is real - coins and bills. The rest I don't believe in, and I don't think I ever did, really. What's a check, after all, but a promise - mine, the bank's. Me, I know, but the bank? — Joanne Greenberg

"I'm sorry I'm young," Deborah answered with a bitterness that was half prose. "We have a right to be as crazy as anyone else" — Joanne Greenberg

Life Lessons by Joanne Greenberg

1. Joanne Greenberg's work emphasizes the importance of resilience and the power of the human spirit to overcome adversity.
2. Through her writing, Greenberg encourages readers to find strength in their own stories and to use their experiences to create a better future.
3. Greenberg's work encourages readers to find hope in difficult times and to remember that even small changes can have a big impact.