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Creativity Quote by Lauryn Hill

"I don't know anybody that's not emotionally unstable or schizophrenic"

About this Quote

Lauryn Hill’s line lands like a shrug that’s also an indictment: if everyone is cracked, then the culture that pretends otherwise is the real liar. Coming from an artist whose public story has been filtered through headlines about brilliance, withdrawal, pressure, and “unreliability,” the quote reads less like a clinical claim than a defensive truth-telling. It’s not diagnosing friends; it’s reframing the baseline. Stability, in this worldview, is either rare or performative.

The move is rhetorically clever because it blurs two registers at once. “Emotionally unstable” is casual, conversational, almost funny in its bluntness; “schizophrenic” is heavier, charged, and technically specific. Putting them side by side creates friction that mirrors the point: we toss around mental-health language because the feelings are real, but our vocabulary is messy and our systems are worse. Hill isn’t offering a DSM definition; she’s describing an environment where fragmentation feels normal - where people are pulled between personas, obligations, and survival scripts.

The subtext is permission and accusation in the same breath. Permission: you’re not uniquely broken; your volatility makes sense. Accusation: if everyone is destabilized, the problem isn’t individual weakness, it’s the conditions - fame machinery, economic stress, the relentless demand to be “on,” even the policing of Black women’s anger and softness. It’s a line that turns pathology into a mirror, and dares the listener to admit what they’ve been hiding under “fine.”

Quote Details

TopicMental Health
SourceHelp us find the source
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Hill, Lauryn. (2026, January 17). I don't know anybody that's not emotionally unstable or schizophrenic. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-dont-know-anybody-thats-not-emotionally-81500/

Chicago Style
Hill, Lauryn. "I don't know anybody that's not emotionally unstable or schizophrenic." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-dont-know-anybody-thats-not-emotionally-81500/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"I don't know anybody that's not emotionally unstable or schizophrenic." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-dont-know-anybody-thats-not-emotionally-81500/. Accessed 5 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

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Lauryn Hill (born May 26, 1975) is a Musician from USA.

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