That night I slept badly, thrashing about in my bed, not quite asleep and not quite awake. At times I had the feeling there was someone else in my bedroom who was talking to me, but of course I could not deal with this perception in any realistic way, since I was half-asleep and half-awake, and thus, for all practical purposes, I was out of my mind.
~ Thomas Ligotti
When life is this dull, you have to invent purpose. Collecting torn-up newspaper gives you a hobby, provides an anchoring intimacy with your surroundings, keeps the streets clean. Or so you think. Then one day you wake up and realise that it was all a con: what you had thought was an escape from madness was in fact the arrival.
~ Alexander Masters
When love is not madness, it is not love...
~ Anushka Bhartiya
An exaltation of spirit lifted me, as it were, far above the earth and the sinful creatures crawling on its surface; and I deemed myself as an eagle among the children of men, soaring on high, and looking down with pity and contempt on the grovelling creatures below.
~ James Hogg
Jessie had never heard you could inherit madness. She thought madness was something that just happened to people in Shakespeare when the wind got up.
~ Lynne Truss
With every vial of success there is always a pinch of madness.
~ Gunther Bearklawth
Madness and witchery as well as bestiality are conditions commonly associated with the use of the female voice in public.
~ Anne Carson
She screamed. Her screaming was beautiful. But, truth be told he missed the crying.
~ Barry Lyga
... your grasp, even in fury, would have a charm for me...
~ Charlotte Brontë
When Kafka allows a friend to understand that he writes because otherwise he would go mad, he knows that writing is madness already, his madness, a kind of vigilence, unrelated to any wakefulness save sleep's: insomnia. Madness against madness, then. But he believes that he masters the one by abandoning himself to it; the other frightens him, and is his fear; it tears through him, wounds and exalts him. It is as if he had to undergo all the force of an uninterruptable continuity, a tension at the edge of the insupportable which he speaks of with fear and not without a feeling of glory. For glory is the disaster.
~ Maurice Blanchot
An old dream with a shiny new veneer. It's fascinating, you know, how an obsolete madness is sometimes adopted and stylized in an attempt to ghoulishly preserve it. These are the days of second-hand fantasies and antiquated hysteria.(The Chymist)
Those teetering on madness hold keys to doors you know nothing about. You must ask yourself if these rooms are worth visiting—if in the end life would have made more sense having been in them.
~ Christopher Hawke
I took a few dragging steps toward the locker-room door. 'You're doing something to me that I wouldn't do to a dog,' I mumbled. 'What you're doing to me is worse than if you were to kill me. You're locking me up in shadows for the rest of my life. You're taking my mind away from me. You're condemning me slowly but surely to madness, to being without a mind. It won't happen right away, but sooner or later, in six months or in a year - Well, I guess that's that.'I fumbled my way out of the locker room and down the passageway outside, guiding myself with one arm along the wall, and past the sergeant's desk and down the steps, and then I was out in the street.(All At Once, No Alice)
~ Cornell Woolrich
Indeed, in that sense we’re all rather often almost like mad people, only with the slight difference that the ‘sick’ are somewhat madder than we are, so that it’s necessary to draw a line here.
~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky
If u are tree, i'll be your shadow,If you free, i'll be your hobbie,If you fly,i'll be your wings,If you cry,i'll be your tears,If you are high,i'll be Your wine,If you are mad,I'll be You Love,If You are Life,I'll Be your Soul!OctavE
~ Gops Octave
Emancipation resulting in madness. Unlimited freedom to choose and play a tremendous variety of roles with a lot of coarse energy.
~ Saul Bellow
Do you know, Alexey Fyodorovitch, how people do go out of their mind?
How could you get mad at someone who neither needed to attack nor was at all worried about being able to defend? It was like getting mad at Switzerland.
~ Karl Marlantes
You have to quit confusing a madness with a mission.
~ Flannery O'connor
...My point is, I went crazy. When I saw what a black, awful joke the world was. I went crazy as a coot! I admit it! Why can't you?
~ Alan Moore
All men are mad in some way or another, and inasmuch as you deal discreetly with your madmen, so deal with God's madmen too, the rest of the world.
~ Bram Stoker
In a town like London there are always plenty of not quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops, because a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money.
~ George Orwell
It's a myth that crazy people don't know they're crazy. Many of us are surely as capable of epiphany and introspection as anyone else, maybe more so. I suspect we spend far more time thinking about our thoughts than do sane people.
~ Caitlín R. Kiernan
Vaughn is talking about the heat, and his voice is so excited that it breaks into whispers at times. He loves his madness the way a bird loves the sky.
~ Lauren Destefano
Crazy people always think they're perfectly sane. It's what makes them so crazy, their entire delusion lies within the fact that they believe they aren't deluded.
~ Nenia Campbell
When people fall in love, they are apt to go a little mad.
~ Jennifer Paynter
Bedlam: an institution with a history so fearsome it gave its name to a synonym for chaos and pandemonium.
~ Jon Ronson
Our love had begun in folly, and ended in madness!
~ Charles Dickens
All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in a strange, sometimes inexplicable ways.
~ Yann Martel
wanting what you could not have led to misery and madness
~ Cassandra Clare
You don't understand, you fool' says Yegor, looking dreamily up at the sky. 'You've never understood what kind of person I am, nor will you in a million years... You just think I'm a mad person who has thrown his life away... Once the free spirit has taken hold of a man, there's no way of getting it out of him.
~ Anton Chekhov
If there was one thing I feared as I was growing up . . . No, that's stupid. I feared hundreds of things: the dark, the death of my father, the possibility that I might rejoice the death of my mother, sums involving vernier calipers, groups of schoolboys with nothing much to do, death by drowning. But of all these, I feared the most the possibility that I might go mad too.
~ Jerry Pinto
Worse than madness. Sanity.
~ William Golding
Madness does not always howl. Sometimes, it is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, Hey, is there room in your head for one more?
~ Despair Inc.
The Mad Scene. Enter Ophelia!
~ Eugene O'neill
You don’t appreciate the fact that madmen are very lucky.
~ Luigi Pirandello
..he was 'nuts about her', as the parlance of the day had it, as if it were generally recognised that love and madness are adjoining rooms with extremely porous walls.
~ Jan Kjærstad
In his madness he became a terrifying actor!
When he did think—when his brain began the slow chugging of rusty gears—the only thoughts that came were unspeakable things like, what’s the worst age a child can die? Worse yet was—after hours spent staring at the ceiling until it became a real-life Escher print with fans on the floor, useless windowsills, and dresser drawers that spilled underwear when opened—worse yet was when his mind found answers to those questions. Two-years-old isn’t so bad, he mused. They barely had a life. Twenty? At least they got to experience life! But fourteen... fourteen was the worst.
~ Jake Vander-Ark
Blood, sweat, and tea, sister! That's what it takes to achieve all great and terrible things.
~ Emory R. Frie
