Dedication

To the mentally ill of all ages, and in memory of Child Hurbinek

"Nothing before had ever made me thoroughly realize, though I had read various scientific books, that science consists in grouping facts so that general laws or conclusions may be drawn from them."
—Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin

"It's just that we don't understand what's the matter... Why did we lose peace and love and health, one after the other? If we knew, if there was anybody to tell us, I believe we could try. I'd try so hard."
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, One Trip Abroad

"It is only ideas of such colossal proportions that a symbol for them cannot be created that are vague and intangible and brooding, incomprehensible and fearful, that produce madness.

The very fact that a thing - anything - can be fitted into a meaning built up of words small, black words that can be written with one hand and the stub of a pencil means that it is not big enough to be overwhelming. It is the vast, formless, unknown and unknowable things that we fear. Anything which can be brought to a common point - a focus within our understanding - can be dealt with."
—Lara Jefferson, These Are My Sisters

I would like to meet the man who, faced with the choice of either becoming a demented human being in male habitus or a spirited woman, would not prefer the latter. Such and only such in the issue for me.
—Dr. jur. Daniel Paul Schreber, "Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, Leipzig, Germany 1903."

Sexual identity guarantees our psychic unity.
—Julia Kristeva, psycho-analyst

When I married I was only half a man and 
could only marry half a woman.
— The father of a schizophrenic patient, gender not stated, speaking to the patient's psychiatrist.

The truth, How can we stand it, or stand for it....One cannot help noticing that they who have a hopeless passion for truth are left largely alone -- when nothing worse can be inflicted upon them.
—Terence O'Carolan, Irish writer and poet.