You don't retire from this." -Billy Johns
"I know." -Melanie Adams
Billy: “If you know that, then you admit that you’re trying to win an unwinnable war.”
Melanie: “It’s not unwinnable, though. We’re one step away.”
Billy: “From rendering yourself insane, maybe.

Those who work for the government are never men of their word. -Axel Chambers

.The insane, on occasion, are not without their charms

Am I cured?” “No. You’re someone who is different, but who wants to be the same as everyone else. And that, in my view, is a serious illness.” “Is wanting to be different a serious illness?” “It is if you force yourself to be the same as everyone else. It causes neuroses, psychoses, and paranoia. It’s a distortion of nature, it goes against God’s laws, for in all the world’s woods and forests, he did not create a single leaf the same as another. But you think it’s insane to be different, and that’s why you chose to live in Villete, because everyone is different here, and so you appear to be the same as everyone else. Do you understand?” Mari nodded. “People go against nature because they lack the courage to be different, and then the organism starts to produce Vitriol, or bitterness, as this poison is more commonly known.

One of them hasn't got a uniform on or plainclothes either like the rest. He has on the white coat that is my nightmare and my horror. And in the crotch of one arm he is upending two long poles intertwined with canvas.

The long-drawn-out death within life. The burial-alive of the mind, covering it over with fresh graveyard earth each time it tries to struggle through to the light. In this kind of death you never finish dying.

("New York Blues")

A sick thought can devour the body's flesh more than fever or consumption.