Frances Farmer Quotes

There comes a point when a dream becomes reality and reality becomes a dream.

To have a good friend is the purest of all God's gifts, for it is a love that has no exchange of payment. It is not inherited, as with a family. It is not compelling, as with a child. And it has no means of physical pleasure, as with a mate. It is, therefore, an indescribable bond that brings with it a far deeper devotion than all the others.

For eight years I was an inmate in a state asylum for the insane. During those years I passed through such unbearable terror that I deteriorated into a wild, frightened creature intent only on survival. And I survived. I was raped by orderlies, gnawed on by rats and poisoned by tainted food. I was chained in padded cells, strapped into strait-jackets and half-drowned in ice baths. And I survived. The asylum itself was a steel trap, and I was not released from its jaws alive and victorious. I crawled out mutilated, whimpering and terribly alone. But I did survive.

I minded my own business, and, unfortunately, so did everyone else.

If you get old fashioned enough, you'll always be in style.

If a person is treated like a patient, they are apt to act like one.

The more people pointed at me in scorn the more stubborn I got and when they began calling me the Bad Girl of West Seattle High, I tried to live up to it.

I have learned that to have a good friend is the purest of all God's gifts, for it is a love that has no exchange of payment.

Have you ever had a broken heart?

Never console yourself into believing that the terror has passed, for it looms as large and evil today as it did in the despicable era of Bedlam. But I must relate the horrors as I recall them, in the hope that some force for mankind might be moved to relieve forever the unfortunate creatures who are still imprisoned in the back wards of decaying institutions.

I miss the comfort in being sad.

I went to Sunday School and liked the stories about Christ and the Christmas star. They were beautiful. They made you warm and happy to think about. But I didn't believe them.

I wondered a little why God was such a useless thing. It seemed a waste of time to have him. After that he became less and less, until he was... nothingness.

I used to lie between cool, clean sheets at night after I'd had a bath, after I had washed my hair and scrubbed my knuckles and finger-nails and teeth. Then I could lie quite still in the dark with my face to the window with the trees in it, and talk to God.

I just knew that God wasn't there. He was a man on a throne in Heaven, so he was easy to forget.

That satisfied me until I began to figure that if God loved all his children equally, why did he bother about my red hat and let other people lose their fathers and mothers for always?

I couldn't get that same feeling during the day, with my hands in dirty dish water and the hard sun showing up the dirtiness on the roof tops. And after a time, even at night, the feeling of God didn't last.

But I was sure of one thing. If God were a father, with children, that cleanliness I had been feeling wasn't God.