6
" Illness is a reminder that we don’t really have any control. And I understand why people find schizophrenia frightening, believe me, I get it. Hallucinations, delusions, it’s difficult to imagine having a mind that is not fully your own, just like it’s difficult to imagine having cancer, where your body isn’t fully your own. But people living with paranoid type often experience less dysfunction than people living with other subtypes. They’re often able to live, work, and care for themselves. And yet, almost every depiction you find in books or movies make people living with paranoid schizophrenia the villains. Can you imagine if books and movies did the same thing to people with cancer? "
― Penny Reid , Marriage of Inconvenience (Knitting in the City, #7)
9
" I said, you fuckfaced shitstain,”—his words were low, slow, measured— “get the fuck away from her, or I will fucking fuckily fuck you the fuck up.”
I stared at Dan, my lips parting in wonder. He’d just used some variation of the F-word as a noun, verb, adverb, and adjective all in one sentence. I didn’t know whether to be mortified or impressed. "
― Penny Reid , Marriage of Inconvenience (Knitting in the City, #7)
13
" I’d thought for so long that I would become a schizophrenic, and if I was a schizophrenic, that’s all I would ever be. But a person doesn’t become their diagnosis. Your mom isn’t breast cancer, you don’t become cancer. You live with cancer. So often, we think of a person living with mental illness as their mental illness, and that’s unfair. A person is never their diagnosis, not even my mom. Delilah showed me that. She lives—and has lived—a full life. She has a husband. They travel. She’s a photographer, an artist. She tells the funniest knock-knock jokes I’ve ever heard. She takes her meds every day, but still has hallucinations from time to time. She is not schizophrenic. She lives with schizophrenia. "
― Penny Reid , Marriage of Inconvenience (Knitting in the City, #7)
19
" We’d spent two years—two fucking years—with a misunderstanding between us. I didn’t want to do that again, not even for two hours.
So what am I going to say?
It was a particular place to be, this limbo. It had me asking myself philosophical questions and thinking things like,
What is love?
And, How do you know you’re in love?
And, Why does she think she loves me?
And, If this shitty feeling is love, I’m going to be so pissed.
Because if this shitty feeling was love, if this choking, desperate mix of happiness and pain I felt every time I saw her or thought about her was love, if I’d been in love with her this whole fucking time and I’d been lying to myself and lying to her and wasting time, then I deserved a big, fat fucking punch in the face.
“Crap,” I said, shaking my head at myself. "
― Penny Reid , Marriage of Inconvenience (Knitting in the City, #7)