How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
It was Victorian, a little run-down, and surrounded by trees. Very good façade for a madhouse [...]. There were bars on all the windows. Deborah smiled slightly. It was fitting. Good. (1.21)
Deborah initially interprets her admittance to the mental hospital as a confinement, an imprisonment that she welcomes because now she'll be alone and able to retreat inward to Yr without as much intrusion from Earth.
Quote #2
To escape engulfment there was only the Here, with its ice-cold doctor and his notebook, or Yr with its golden meadows and gods. But Yr also held its regions of horror and lostness and she no longer knew to which kingdom in Yr there was passage. (2.2)
Deborah describes her longing to escape the real world here. The problem now is that even in Yr there are imperfections: the freedom Yr once gave her no longer exists. Even an invented world can't be perfect, because its creator isn't perfect; the real world and its problems seep in eventually.
Quote #3
Now, as by the laws of the world, her image walked around and answered and asked and acted; she, no longer Deborah, but a person bearing the appropriate name for a dweller on Yr's plains, sang and danced and recited the ritual songs to a caressing wind that blew on the long grasses. (2.8)
The Powers of Yr and its Falling God, Anterrabae, reward Deb for telling the truth of some events of her life to the first doctor who interviews her at the mental hospital. They do this by letting her roam the plains of Yr, oblivious to the real world, for two days. In Yr, Deborah doesn't have to be her messy self. She is free of the world and can escape for a little while.
Quote #4
"Do you mean to ask me if I think you belong here, if yours is what is called a mental illness" Then the answer is yes" [...] As bald as that. Yet with the terror connected with the hedged-about word 'crazy,' the unspoken word that Deborah was thinking about now, there was a light coming from the doctor's spoken words, a kind of light shone back on many rooms of the past." (3.40-41)
When Dr. Fried reveals that she thinks Deborah is mentally ill, it scares Deborah. But it also frees her now that it's out in the open. Sometimes things are scarier when we keep them bottled up and secret. And hey, as we all know, the truth will set you free.
Quote #5
After a while, hoping to hear the voice, becoming sadder with the loss of it, she found it again in the night of stars […] the same rich voice saying like a poem, You can be our bird, free in wind. You can be our wild horse who shakes his head and is not ashamed. (8.16)
Ah, yes. Here we see the good old days of Yr, before it got all "judgy," like the real world is. Yr used to represent total freedom of expression for Deborah, not to mention freedom from pain. But it's all illusory—there's no real freedom when you're totally confined within your own head.
Quote #6
"My help is so that you can be free to fight for all of these things. The only reality I offer is challenge, and being well is being free to accept it or not at whatever level you are capable. I never promise lies, and the rose garden world of perfection is a lie…and a bore, too!'" (13.41)
Dr. Fried is brutally honest with Deborah. She knows the world can be cruel, and she makes no promise that she'll magically be able to solve all of Deborah's problems. But Dr. Fried knows that being healthy gives you the freedom to meet the world head on and decide how and who you're going to be in life.
Quote #7
Esther could not bear the thought of Suzy replacing the familiar image of her sister with the wild-eyed face of the strait-jacketed stereotype chained in an attic. She realized now that it was this stereotype that she and Jacob had begun to imagine the first time they heard the grating of the locks, when they saw the barred windows, and when they shuddered to the screaming of a woman from some high gable. (16.2)
Esther and Jacob have both seen their daughter as a prisoner of her own mind—and of the hospital. They're not entirely wrong, but their view is limited, because they don't understand Deborah's perspective. How is Deborah both confined to and free within her own mind, depending on how you look at it?
Quote #8
(I am free!) Deborah answered, breaking chains and doing a caper. (23.18)
Deborah is communicating via hand signals to Miss Coral. Deborah's in B ward, while Miss Coral is still up in D. Deborah now has more literal freedoms: she can move around on the hospital campus, and she can go out into town. She's also starting to gain more control over her own mind, and this gives her a sense of greater freedom.
Quote #9
On regular days the Semblance could be pulled up like a screen over body and mind, but Sunday called itself Rest and Freedom, and threw one off guard. Sunday promised leisure, peace, holiness, and love. It was a restatement of the wish for human perfection. (26.9).
Deborah calls the outward, well-behaved face you present to the world the "Semblance." But on this particular Sunday, she and Carla wander off the hospital grounds and into the town, where they drop their Semblances. They dance in the rain and stay out past midnight. They feel truly free for a while.
Quote #10
"It was freedom they gave me after all. Carmen's didn't give her a chance, but mine…" It came to Deborah that it was her parents who had bought this fight for her. They could have cut her off from it the minute that she failed to make their progress. They had kept the faith with a future which might never sing their praises. "Carla…if I weren't scared to death of it, I would be so grateful!" (26.67-69)
Here Deborah shows gratitude for the freedom her parents gave her by leaving her at the mental hospital for three years. They've allowed her to go completely and utterly crazy—and then figure out how to be herself, how to be healthy, and how to choose her own life.