Saks Quotes & Sayings

The human brain comprises about 2 percent of a person's body weight, but it consumes upward of 20 pcent of that body's oxygen intake, and it controls 100 percent of that body's actions. — Elyn R. Saks

Art is the manipulation of someone else's imagination. — Sol Saks

Mental illness is among the most stigmatized of categories.' People are ashamed of being mentally ill. They fear disclosing their condition to their friends and confidants-and certainly to their employers. — Elyn R. Saks

The schizophrenic mind is not so much split as shattered. I like to say schizophrenia is like a waking nightmare. — Elyn Saks

The humanity we all share is more important than the mental illnesses we may not — Elyn R. Saks

Occupying my mind with complex problems has been my best and most powerful and most reliable defense against my mental illness. — Elyn Saks

There's a tremendous need to implode the myths of mental illness, to put a face on it, to show people that a diagnosis does not have to lead to a painful and oblique life ... We who struggle with these disorders can lead full, happy, productive lives, if we have the right resources. — Elyn R. Saks

We must stop criminalizing mental illness. It's a national tragedy and scandal that the L.A. County Jail is the biggest psychiatric facility in the United States. — Elyn Saks

Within the first year of launching my company, Spanx, I decided to go over to England and cold-call Harrods, Harvey Nichols, and Selfridges the same way I had cold-called Neiman Marcus, Saks, Nordstrom, and Bloomingdale's here in the United States. — Sara Blakely

Never forget that all these people are primarily a visual people. They are designers, window dressers, models, photographers, graphic artists. They design the windows at Saks. Do you understand? They are a visual people, and they value the eye, and their sins, as Saint Augustine said, are the sins of the eye. And being people who live on the surface of the eye, they cannot be expected to have minds or hearts. It sounds absurd but it's that simple. Everything is beautiful here, and that is all it is: beautiful. Do not expect anything else, do not expect nourishment for anything but your eye - and you will handle it all beautifully. You will know exactly what you are dealing with. — Andrew Holleran

Choose your friends wisely, and also choose friends that you can trust. — Elyn Saks

Please hear this: There are not 'schizophrenics.' There are people with schizophrenia. — Elyn Saks

Some of us shorten our names or our noses or both ... We Jews can be extremely neurotic and are inclined to become easily depressed. Most Jews seldom say, 'Have a nice day' or even have one. To be honest, I've never heard a Jew say that. We're just not that optimistic. Life is neither a bed of roses nor a bowl of cherries. — Gene Saks

Even with all that - excellent treatment, wonderful family and friends, supportive work environment - I did not make my illness public until relatively late in life, and that's because the stigma against mental illness is so powerful that I didn't feel safe with people knowing. If you hear nothing else today, please hear this: There are not 'schizophrenics'. There are people with schizophrenia, and these people may be your spouse, they may be your child, they may be your neighbor, they may be your friend, they may be your coworker. — Elyn Saks

Everything about my journey to get Spanx off the ground entailed me having to be a salesperson - from going to the hosiery mills to get a prototype made to calling Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus. I had to position myself to get five minutes in the door with buyers. — Sara Blakely

Playwrights are naturally wary and protective - God, who's more protective than a playwright? You read a play, the playwright wants to hear from you immediately. — Gene Saks

Someone told me that when they go to Vermont, they feel like they're home. I'm that way at Saks. — Caroline Rhea

Dropping in and out of your own life (for psychotic breaks, or treatment in a hospital) isn't like getting off a train at one stop and later getting back on at another. Even if you can get back on (and the odds are not in your favor), you're lonely there. The people you boarded with originally are far, far ahead of you, and now you're stuck playing catch-up. — Elyn R. Saks

One of the reasons the doctors gave for hospitalizing me against my will was that I was 'gravely disabled.' To support this view, they wrote in my chart that I was unable to do my Yale Law School homework. I wondered what that meant about much of the rest of New Haven. — Elyn Saks

Stigma against mental illness is a scourge with many faces, and the medical community wears a number of those faces. — Elyn R. Saks

Some people still hold [the] view that restraints help psychiatric patients feel safe. I've never met a psychiatric patient who agreed. — Elyn Saks

If you are walking on a path thick with brambles and rocks, a path that abruptly twists and turns, it's easy to get lost, or tired, or discouraged. You might be tempted to give up entirely. But if a kind and patient person comes along and takes your hand, saying, "I see you're having a hard time- here, follow me, I'll help you find your way," the path becomes manageable, the journey less frightening. — Elyn R. Saks

My mind has been both my best friend and my worst enemy. — Elyn Saks

In a way, I had a very good and normal childhood. I had loving and caring parents. But I had a lot of quirks or problems when I was growing up. I had phobias and obsessions. — Elyn Saks

Portray [people with mental illness] sympathetically, and portray them in all the richness and depth of their experience as people, and not as diagnoses. — Elyn Saks

Sad times May follow your tracks, Bad times May bar you from Saks, Add times When Satan in slacks Breaks down your self control ... — Cole Porter

I was afraid the staff would laugh at me - and as frightened as I was, the thought of derision frightened me even more. In retrospect, it was a life-threatening deception, somewhat along the lines of hiding recurrent chest pains from one's cardiologist from embarrassment. Nearly — Elyn R. Saks

And I call Saks Fifth Ave-y home. That is where a real bad Barbie roam. — Nicki Minaj

My good fortune is not that I've recovered from mental illness. I have not, nor will I ever. My good fortune lies in having found my life. — Elyn R. Saks

All my life, books had been the life raft, the safe haven, the place I ran to when nothing else worked. — Elyn R. Saks

When I was a girl, my grandmother would take me during the holidays to see the windows at Saks and Rockefeller Center. — Michael Learned

No one would ever say that someone with a broken arm or a broken leg is less than a whole person, but people say that or imply that all the time about people with mental illness. — Elyn R. Saks

But explaining what I've come to call "disorganization" is a different challenge altogether. Consciousness gradually loses its coherence. One's center gives way. The center cannot hold. The "me" becomes a haze, and the solid center from which one experiences reality breaks up like a bad radio signal. — Elyn R. Saks

I am a woman with chronic schizophrenia. I have spent hundreds of days in psychiatric hospitals. I could have ended up living most of my life on a back ward, but things turned out quite differently. — Elyn Saks

There are forces of nature and circumstance that are beyond our control, let alone our understanding, and to insist on victory in the face of this, to accept nothing less, is just asking for a soul-pummeling. The simple truth is, not every fight can be won. — Elyn R. Saks

Some people say I'm unique, that there aren't other people with schizophrenia like me. Well, there are people like me out there, but the stigma is so great that they don't come forward. — Elyn Saks

I used to go to Saks, I would go to Bergdorf, I would go to Barneys, I would go to thrift stores in SoHo. — ASAP Rocky

I bought into Saks as a personal investment because, when I was a young man and went to America for the first time, it seemed to me that Saks was like a cathedral of retail. I never dreamt that I could one day be a part of it. And now I am. — Diego Della Valle

My experience is that when one is in psychosis, you're on a mission and nothing is going to stop you. At some level your brain is telling you you probably shouldn't be doing this, but you're on a mission. — Elyn Saks

I quickly discovered that trying to go play golf while living in Manhattan was about as easy as trying to grab a taxi while standing out in front of Saks Fifth Avenue in the freezing rain on the last shopping day before Christmas. — Dan Jenkins

In my experience, the words "now just calm down" almost inevitably have the opposite effect on the person you are speaking to. — Elyn R. Saks

I think money isn't any good sitting around, so I spend some time in the shoe department at Saks. — Janet Evanovich

Nothing I can do. There will be raging fires, and hundreds, maybe thousands of people lying dead in the streets. And it will all - all of it - be my fault. — Elyn R. Saks

We are basically storytellers, descendants of the old men who sat around the fire and told us legends, fairytales, exploits, or maybe just how funny Og looked when he fell into the tar pit. — Sol Saks

If you are a Rothschild, a Rosenwald, a Gimbel, or even a Waldbaum, growing up Jewish can be a rich experience. For the rest of us, it could be just so-so. — Gene Saks

Don't focus on it," she said. "Don't define yourself in terms of something which even many highly trained and gifted professionals do not fully understand. — Elyn R. Saks

Saks is one of the temples of good-quality products in America. The Saks shop in New York, for me, is the most interesting department store in America. — Diego Della Valle

What a lucky girl you are to have this opportunity to live in one of the world's great cities at this most fascinating point in its long, rich history, they had said. Little Becky had known enough not to ask if there was going to be a Banana Republic or a Gap there, or a Tower Records or a Starbucks or a Tweeters or a Blockbuster or a Super CVS or a Saks. Her mother only mentioned museums and concert halls and churches and architecture, so Little Becky was quite sure there was no room left in Prague for anything good to be built. — Nancy Clark

For me, I had to overcome shyness to be an actor. But as a director, you lose your subjectivity, your self-consciousness. And instead of just your role, it's the life of the whole play that becomes a reflection of you. — Gene Saks

I wanted to go higher than Rockefeller Center, which was being erected across the street from Saks Fifth Avenue and was going to cut off my view of the sky ... Flying got into my soul instantly but the answer as to why must be found somewhere back in the mystic maze of my birth and childhood and the circumstances of my earlier life. Whatever I am is elemental and the beginnings of it all have their roots in Sawdust Road. I might have been born in a hovel, but I determined to travel with the wind and stars. — Jacqueline Cochran

Some truths that were too difficult and frightening to know. — Elyn R. Saks

Everyone becomes psychotic in his or her own ways. — Elyn Saks