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

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 didn’t think then, and I still don’t, that I was actually sick.

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....

I think God just died of old age. And, when I realized that he wasn’t any more, it didn’t shock me. It seemed natural and right!

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 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...

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.

The Sunday School teacher talked too much in the way our grade school teacher used to when she told us about George Washington. Pleasant, pretty stories, but not true.

It puzzled me that other people hadn’t found out, too. God was gone. We were younger. We had reached past him. Why couldn’t they see it? It still puzzles me.

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

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 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.

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

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

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,...