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Quotes About Insanity

Crazy people do crazy things.
~ Thomas Leo Clancy Jr.
The human phenomenon is but the sum Of densely coiled layers of illusion Each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity That there are persons of any kind When all there can be is mindless mirrors Laughing and screaming as they parade about in an endless dream
~ Thomas Ligotti
My grandfather felt at home with his lunatics.
~ Thomas Ligotti
The normal process of life contains moments as bad as any of those which insane melancholy is filled with, moments in which radical evil gets its innings and takes its solid turn. The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony. If you protest, my friend, wait until you arrive there yourself. (The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902)
~ Thomas Ligotti
It was no amalgam of colors comparable to anything in mortal existence. It was as if all natural colors had been mutated into a painfully lush iridescence by some prism fantastically corrupted in its form; it was a rainbow staining the sky after a poison deluge; it was an aurora painting the darkness with a blaze of insanity, a blaze that did not burn vigorously but shimmered with an insect-jeweled frailness.
~ Thomas Ligotti
there was still some greater chaos, some deeper insanity, than one had counted on, or could ever be taken into account – wherever there was anything, there would be chaos and insanity to such a degree that one could never come to terms with it, and it was only a matter of time before your world, whatever you thought it to be, was undermined, if not completely overrun, by another world.
~ Thomas Ligotti
The world dotes on its lunatics, whether saintly or sadistic, and commemorates their careers. Psychopaths make terrific material for news agencies and movie studios; their exploits always draw a crowd. But the moment a discouraging word is spoken, some depressing knowledge, that crowd either disperses or goes on the attack. It is depression not madness that cows us, demoralization not insanity that we dread, disillusionment of the mind not its derangement that imperils our culture of hope.
~ Thomas Ligotti
Only after everyone who ever remembered you is gone for good and all does the terrible insanity that once bore your name achieve a true oblivion. Good-bye.
~ Thomas Ligotti
Insanity is the only sane reaction to an insane society.
~ Thomas Stephen Szasz
had gone insane and would throw the child, perhaps
~ Thomas Thompson
You're a sane person reacting to an insane situation.
~ Tia Williams
We don't simply say something that's untrue. We make statements so insane that there's no possible intelligent response. Like arguing with some old fart in a rocking chair who claims we never landed on the moon. Any educated person can only laugh. Meanwhile, we've just won over all the non-moon-landing votes.
~ Tim Dorsey
I don't suffer from insanity. I can actually say that I enjoy it.
~ Tim Dorsey
That, and the untended mental health problems. We have all these insane armed hobos coming from the Midwest, usually Ohio. Fuck Ohio.
~ Tim Dorsey
Russian humor is to adapt or make some sense or nonsense out of the insanity of their lives.
~ Ian Frazier
I think everybody's nuts.
~ Johnny Depp
To me, if I retire tomorrow, what the hell am I gonna do? Sit around the house and do nothing? I would drive everybody crazy, including myself. I would go nuts - literally, I would go insane.
~ Max Cavalera
The feeling of joy came up in me again the way the lyric of a song might remind a man on the edge of insanity that soon he will be insane again and there is a world there more interesting than his own.
~ Norman Mailer
When the wings of insanity beat so near, one pays attention to a feather
~ Norman Mailer
They had to recognize, Woods warned, that the law wanted to keep psychopathy and psychosis apart. If the psychopath were ever accepted as legally insane, then crime, judgment, and punishment would be replaced by antisocial act, therapy, and convalescence.
~ Norman Mailer
He who would do some great thing in this short life must apply himself to the work with such a concentration of his forces as, to idle spectators, who live only to amuse themselves, looks like insanity.
~ Orison Swett Marden
There was no name for the disease; his body had gone insane, forgotten the blueprint by which human beings were built. Even now the disease still lives on in his children. Not in our bodies, but in our souls. We exist where normal human children are expected to be; we're even shaped the same. But each of us in our own way has been replaced by an imitation child, shaped out of a twisted, fetid, lipidous goiter that grew out of Father's soul.
~ Orson Scott Card
I quite agree with Dr. Nordau's assertion that all men of genius are insane, but Dr. Nordau forgets that all sane people are idiots.
~ Oscar Wilde
And Clifford the same. All that talk! All that writing! All that wild struggling to push himself forwards! It was just insanity. And it was getting worse, really maniacal. Connie felt washed-out with fear. But at least, Clifford was shifting his grip from her on to Mrs Bolton. He did not know it. Like many insane people, his insanity might be measured by the things he was not aware of, the great desert tracts in his consciousness.
~ D.H. Lawrence