At the beginning of It’s Kind of a Funny Story, Craig believes that he is someone who struggles to make friends and form romantic relationships. Over the course of several days in an adult psychiatric hospital, however, Craig learns that his fears about new relationships are based on low self-esteem and that all sorts of people are willing to form relationships with him. Within moments of arriving, Craig meets people like Bobby, Johnny, and Humble, who are older than Craig and come from different backgrounds but immediately take a liking to him, bonding over their shared mental health struggles. Craig also meets Noelle and is surprised to learn that a girl he finds so attractive also seems to like him.
A turning point for Craig is when Nia breaks up with Aaron and comes to visit Craig in the hospital. Craig learns that Nia might have reciprocated his feelings if he’d made an advance on her earlier, but he ultimately learns that maybe it’s for the best that he was never in a relationship with her because of their incompatible personalities. Craig also learns difficult lessons about friendship—while his fellow patients help him during his time of need, Bobby ultimately refuses to give Craig his phone number, believing that it would be best for Craig not to get too attached. Craig is disappointed at first but eventually realizes that as important as his friendships and romantic relationship are, his primary focus while he’s in the psychiatric hospital should be to learn to manage his own symptoms. It’s Kind of a Funny Story dramatizes how even people who think they are unworthy of love of friendship have a lot to offer, but it also shows how relationships alone cannot fix a person’s underlying mental health issues, even if they do play a role in learning to manage them.
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Friendship and Romance Quotes in It’s Kind of a Funny Story
I had a sudden urge to walk out over the trussing and lean over the water, to declare myself to the world. Once it came into my head, I couldn’t push it away.
“He’s always talking about himself and his problems. Like you. You’re both self-centered. Only, you have a low opinion of yourself, so it’s tolerable. He has a really high opinion of himself. It’s a pain.”
“You want my girl, dude. You’ve wanted her for like two years. You’re mad that you didn’t get her, and now you’ve decided to turn being mad into being depressed, and now you’re off somewhere, probably getting turned into somebody’s bitch, trying to play the pity card to get her to end up with you … And I call you as a friend to try and lighten your mood and you hit me with all of this crap? Who do you think you are?”
“I have shirts. I’ll lend you a shirt.”
“I have to have surgery to clear them up. You think I should?”
“No. Why hide what you’ve been through?”
“I don’t know if that’s really a question. It’s too obvious. Wouldn’t I be happier without scars?”
“I don’t know. It’s tough to tell what would make you happy. I thought I’d be happier in a really tough high school, and I ended up here.”
“You don’t want any of your Anchors being members of the opposite sex you’re attracted to,” Dr. Minerva says. “Relationships change even more than people. It’s like two people changing. It’s exponentially more volatile. Especially two teenagers.”
“You’re not like all these other people with their stupid little problems. You’re like, really screwed up.” She giggles. “In the good way. The way that gives experience.”
“You were the one who suggested I do stuff from childhood,” I continue. “I used to do these when I was a kid, and I forgot how fun they were.”
“Yeah, well, all the worse, then, when you try to call me or Johnny up and find out that we’ve OD’ed, or been shot, or come back here even worse, or just disappeared.”
“That’s a pretty negative view.”
“I’ve seen it before. You just remember us, okay? We meet in the outside world, it just ruins it. You’ll be embarrassed of me and I . . .” He smiles. “… I might be embarrassed of me, too. And I might be embarrassed of you, if you don’t keep your stuff together.”
“Thanks. You sure no numbers?”
Bobby shakes my hand. “If we need to, we’ll meet.”
“This I have not heard in so long!” He’s grinning so much I think his glasses are going to fall off.
I’m not better, you know. The weight hasn’t left my head. I feel how easily I could fall back into it, lie down and not eat, waste my time and curse wasting my time, look at my homework and freak out and go and chill at Aaron’s, look at Nia and be jealous again, take the subway home and hope that it has an accident, go and get my bike and head to the Brooklyn Bridge. All of that is still there. The only thing is, it’s not an option now. It’s just… a possibility, like it’s a possibility that I could turn to dust in the next instant and be disseminated throughout the universe as an omniscient consciousness. It’s not a very likely possibility.
So now live for real, Craig. Live. Live. Live. Live.
Live.
