How can a doctor judge a woman's sanity by merely bidding her good morning and refusing to hear her pleas for release? Even the sick ones know it is useless to say anything, for the answer will be that it is their imagination.

I have watched patients stand and gaze longingly toward the city they in all likelihood will never enter again. It means liberty and life; it seems so near, and yet heaven is not further from hell.

What a mysterious thing madness is. I have watched patients whose lips are forever sealed in a perpetual silence. They live, breathe, eat; the human form is there, but that something, which the body can live without, but which cannot exist without the body, was missing.

I took upon myself to enact the part of a poor, unfortunate crazy girl, and felt it my duty not to shirk any of the disagreeable results that should follow.

I always had a desire to know asylum life more thoroughly - a desire to be convinced that the most helpless of God's creatures, the insane, were cared for kindly and properly.

I shuddered to think how completely the insane were in the power of their keepers, and how one could weep and plead for release, and all of no avail, if the keepers were so minded.

It is only after one is in trouble that one realizes how little sympathy and kindness there are in the world.

They were being driven to a prison, through no fault of their own, in all probability for life. In comparison, how much easier it would be to walk to the gallows than to this tomb of living horrors!

I had never been near insane persons before in my life, and had not the faintest idea of what their actions were like.

All the asylum clothing is made by the patients, but sewing does not employ one's mind. After several months' confinement the thoughts of the busy world grow faint, and all the poor prisoners can do is to sit and ponder over their hopeless fate.

People in the world can never imagine the length of days to those in asylums. They seemed never ending, and we welcomed any event that might give us something to think about as well as talk of.

Could I pass a week in the insane ward at Blackwell's Island? I said I could and I would. And I did.

On the wagon sped, and I, as well as my comrades, gave a despairing farewell glance at freedom as we came in sight of the long stone buildings.

I hardly expected the grand jury to sustain me, after they saw everything different from what it had been while I was there. Yet they did, and their report to the court advises all the changes made that I had proposed.

I had, toward the last, been shut off from all visitors, and so when the lawyer, Peter A. Hendricks, came and told me that friends of mine were willing to take charge of me if I would rather be with them than in the asylum, I was only too glad to give my consent.

How can a doctor judge a woman's sanity by merely bidding her good morning and refusing to hear her pleas for release? Even the sick ones know it is useless to say anything, for the answer will be that it is their imagination.

In our short walks we passed the kitchen where food was prepared for the nurses and doctors. There we got glimpses of melons and grapes and all kinds of fruits, beautiful white bread and nice meats, and the hungry feeling would be increased tenfold.

I always made a point of telling the doctors I was sane, and asking to be released, but the more I endeavored to assure them of my sanity, the more they doubted it.

I had looked forward so eagerly to leaving the horrible place, yet when my release came and I knew that God's sunlight was to be free for me again, there was a certain pain in leaving.

Even that was all consumed after two days, and the patients had to try to choke down fresh fish, just boiled in water, without salt, pepper or butter; mutton, beef, and potatoes without the faintest seasoning.

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

For someone who writes fiction, in order to activate the imagination and the unconscious, it's essential to be free.

The most dire disaster in love is the death of imagination.

We especially need imagination in science.

There is only one admirable form of the imagination: the imagination that is so intense that it creates a new reality, that it makes things happen.

He is indebted to his memory for his jests and to his imagination for his facts.

It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary.

Politics is the enemy of the imagination.

Happiness is ideal, it is the work of the imagination.

Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel.

You want to do something that shows some type individuality and talent and imagination - at the same time, you want to be truthful to the predecessors, because obviously the audience liked something about them and you have to replicate that experience to a certain extent.

To them though, not to us, we were just a catalyst for their imagination.

In this drawing we just let our imagination run wild. We visualized Superman toys, games, and a radio show - that was before TV - and Superman movies. We even visualized Superman billboards. And it's all come true.

To put yourself in another's place requires real imagination, but by doing so each Girl Scout will be able to love among others happily.

If you use your imagination, you can look at any actress and see her nude... I hope to make you use your imagination.

Toy Soldiers was my introduction to film. I certainly didn't think I was doing art by any stretch of the imagination.

There is hope in dreams, imagination, and in the courage of those who wish to make those dreams a reality.

The worlds I paint leave a lot to engage the imagination by hinting at what lies beyond the four edges of the painting. I think getting beyond the four edges of an opportunity or challenge is one of the basic skills you need in business.

Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.

The travel writer seeks the world we have lost - the lost valleys of the imagination.

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

Enthusiasm is that temper of the mind in which the imagination has got the better of the judgment.

I mean, the most important thing to me is imagination.

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

War, except in self-defense, is a failure of moral imagination.

Imagination allows us to escape the predictable. It enables us to reply to the common wisdom that we cannot soar by saying, "Just watch!"

Here is everything which can lay hold of the eye, ear and imagination - everything which can charm and bewitch the simple and ignorant. I wonder how Luther ever broke the spell.

In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.

I like photographs which leave something to the imagination.