"The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be
found among those who appear to be most normal.
"Many of them are normal because they are so well
adjusted to our mode of existence,
because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives,
that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does."
They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word;
they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society.
Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness.
These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted."
"We live together, we act on, and react to, one another;
but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves.
The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone.
Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence;
in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude.
Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—
all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable.
We can pool information about experiences,
but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation,
every human group is a society of island universes."
