It's Kind of a Funny Story Favorite Quotes

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It's Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini Favorite Quotes:

"I have a system with bathrooms. I spend a lot of time in them. They are sanctuaries, public places of peace spaced throughout the world for people like me." (page 6-7)

"[Were you abused?] What kind of question was that? Of course I wasn't abused. If I were, things would be so simple. I'd have a justification and something that I could work on. The world wasn't going too give me something that tidy." (page 11)

"I just want to not be me. Whether it's sleeping or playing video games or riding my bike or studying. Giving my brain up. That's what's important." (page 19)

"I wanted there to be a Shift so bad. I want to feel my brain slide back into the slot it was meant to be in, rest there the way it did before" (page 17) […] "The shift is coming. The shift had to be coming. Because if you keep on living like this you'll die." (page 46)

"'Get up there and fight, soldier! The enemy is there!'
'The enemy is too strong. I can't fight them. They're too smart.'" (page 29)
[…] "'Are you still concentrated on the enemy, soldier?'
'I don't think so.'
'Do you even know who the enemy is?'
'I think…It's me.'
'That's right.'" (page 45)

"So why am I depressed? That's the million dollar question, baby, the Tootsie Roll question; not even the owl knows the answer to that one. I don't know either. All I know is the chronology." (page 49)

"They're sort of ancillary anyway, friends. I mean, they're important - everybody knows that; the TV tells you so - but they come and go. You lose one friend, you pick up another." (page 52)

"I wasn't gifted. Mom was wrong. I was just smart and I worked hard. I had fooled myself into thinking that was something important to the rest of the world. Other People were complicit in this ruse. Nobody had told me I was common." (page 96)

"Dr. Barney stared at me, his lips puckered. What was he so serious about? Who hadn't thought about killing themselves, as a kid? How can you grow up in this world and not think about it? It's an option taken by a lot of successful people: Ernest Hemingway, Socrates, Jesus." (page 102)

**I would like to add Ned Vizzini to that list of successful people who have taken their life. Vizzini, the author of It's Kind of a Funny Story, committed suicide at the age of 32 by jumping off a roof of a building in 2013. (Read: NY Times article)

"…I can waste hours, just lying and looking at the ceiling, and time goes slowly and really fast at the same time - then it's midnight and I have to go to sleep because no matter what I do, I have to be at school the next day. I can't let them know what's happening to me." (page 106)

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"Some days I woke up and got out of bed and brushed my teeth like any normal human being; some days I woke up and lay in bed and looked at the ceiling and wondered what the hell the point was of getting out of bed and brushing my teeth like any normal human being." (page 114)

"'Why don't you do art anymore?'
'I don't have time.'
'Silly. You always have time.'
'Oh yeah.'
'Yes. Time is a person-made concept.'
'Really? Where'd you hear that?'
'I made it up.'
'I don't know if that's true. We all live within time. It rules us.'
'I use my time how I want, so I rule it.'" (page 115)

"I sit and drink the warm milk and think nothing. It's a talent I've developed - one thing I've learned recently. How to think nothing. Here's the trick: don't have any interest in the world around you, don't have any hope for the future, and be warm." (page 130)

"There's so much more for me to be doing. I should be a success and I'm not and other people - younger people - are. Younger people than me are on TV and getting paid and winning scholarships and getting their lives in order. I'm still nobody. When am I going to not be a nobody?" (page 136)

"I want my heart but my brain is acting up. I want to live but I want to die. What do I do?" (page 140)

"What's a triumph is that you woke up this morning and decided to live. That's a triumph. That's what you did today." (page 226)

"'You have a chemical imbalance, that is all.'
I sigh. I don't know how much of it is really chemical. Sometimes I just think depression's one way of coping with the world. Like, some people get drunk, some do drugs, some people get depressed. Because there's so much stuff out there that you have to do something to deal with it." (page 240)

"A working brain is probably a lot like a map, where anybody can get from one place to another on the freeways. It's the nonworking brains that get blocked, that have dead ends, that are under construction like mine." (page 292)

"People don't make good anchors, though, Craig. They change. The people here are going to change.The patients are going to leave. You can't rely on them." (page 309)

"My friend's are all calling me up now: this one's depressed, that one's depressed. I look at what the doctors hands out, and there are studies that show like, one fifth of Americans suffer from a mental illness, and suicide is the number two killer among teenagers and all this cheap…I mean everybody's messed up." (page 364)

"I don't owe people anything, and I don't have to talk to them any more than I feel I need to." (page 396)

"When you say the truth you get stronger." (page 416)

"It's tough to get out of bed; I know that myself. You can lie there for an hour and a half without thinking anything, just worrying about what the day holds and knowing that you won't be able to deal with it." (page 423)

Its Kind of a Funny Story