Madness Quotes

And we cannot keep our balance. Myth gives way to Reason. Revelation to Orthodoxy. We must dance or go mad.

Blood, sweat, and tea, sister! That's what it takes to achieve all great and terrible things.

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

[defines a madman as] a man who preferred to become mad,in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor.

Antonin Artaud

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!

Luigi Pirandello

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

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?

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

You`ll wondering why aren`t you born in Japan if you think you`re an Otaku

Otaku Quotes

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

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

Nūllum magnum ingenium sine mixtūrā dēmentiae fuitNo great talent without an element of madness

Seneca

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

You understand the logic behind the illogical, Alyssa. It's in your nature to find tranquility amid the madness. And that's what we're doing here. We are giving our food a fighting chance.

A.G. Howard

All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.

Herman Melville

No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.- Aristotle (Attributed by Seneca in Moral Essays, "De Tranquillitate Animi" On Tranquility of Mind, sct. 17, subsct. 10.)

Aristotle

Ten days is time enough to die, to be born, to fall in love and to go mad. Ten days is a very long time.

Anna Funder

They certified that I was sane; but I know that I am mad." This confession gives us the key to what is most important and significant in Tolstoy's hidden life.

Lev Shestov

Perhaps it was a passing moment of madness after all. There is no trace of it any more. My odd feelings of the other week seem to me quite ridiculous today: I can no longer enter into them.

Jean-Paul Sartre

In our hallway, ablaze with welcoming lights, my Lolita peeled off her sweater, shook her gemmed hair, stretched towards me two bare arms, raised one knee:“Carry me upstairs, please. I feel sort of romantic tonight.”It may interest physiologists to learn, at this point, that I have the ability - a most singular case, I presume - of shedding torrents of tears throughout the other tempest.

Vladimir Nabokov

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

They ask me what is madness and I reply it is a gift.They ask me why, and I said:The world trough the eyes of normal people is boring, but look at it trough the eyes of the mad, then you will know why I enjoy my madness so much!

Seid Šabanović

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")

Thomas Ligotti

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

Troublemakers will infect you with the malady of their madness.

Bryant McGill

The day was ill-omened from the beginning; one of those unlucky days when every little detail seems to go wrong and one finds oneself engaged in a perpetual and infuriating strife with inanimate objects. How truly fiendish the sub-human world can be on these occasions! How every atom, every cell, every molecule, seems to be leagued in a maddening conspiracy against the unfortunate being who has incurred its obscure displeasure!

Anna Kavan

My girl was mad and I loved her. Upon a night, she read my poetry; and kissing me madly she cried, ‘You are a genius, my love!’ To which I replied, ‘My girl,’ whispering, ‘Every doctor in this land with a prescription pad is more of a genius than I.

Roman Payne

An intense life needs a touch of madness.

Paulo Coelho

All love stories are not same, perhaps a little madness makes it special.

Tarif Naaz

Going insane would be worse than dying. At least death is clear and final

Rita Stradling

When all you have to face all life issues is the attitude forced on to you by society traditions, you will then regret not being the mad you used to be but will never be again.

Sameh Elsayed

He was walking around in circles, the smell of the old furniture suddenly very distinct. There was a newspaper in his hand and he started reading it, paying particular attention to the headlines which seemed to be floating towards him so that now a band of black print encircled his forehead. He was curled upon the bed, hugging his knees, when the next horror came upon him: those who heard him last night would now have to report his theft, and his employer would call the police. He saw how the policeman took the telephone call at the station; how his name and address were spoken out loud; how he looked down at the floor as they led him away; how he was in the dock, forced to answer questions about himself, and now he was in a cell and had lost control of his own body. He was staring out of the window at the passing clouds when it occurred to him that he should write to his employer, explaining his drunkenness and confessing that he invented the story of theft; but who would believe him? It was always said that in drink there was truth, and perhaps it was true that he was a convicted thief. He began to sing,One fine day in the middle of the night,Two dead men got up to fightand then he knew what was meant by madness.

Peter Ackroyd

You who understand what a human mind can be, how can you bear it? I don't have the hundredth part of your mind and there are days when I think I'll go mad. I can feel it. Or hear it. It's more like hearing something creeping along the walls, just behind my head, getting closer and closer. A big insect, maybe a scorpion. A dry skittering, that's what madness sounds like to me.

Annabel Lyon

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Madness Quotes

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