Quotes About Madness

struck depths that your little brain can't picture! I have seen beyond the bounds of infinity and drawn down daemons from the stars… I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness… Space belongs to me, do you hear?

H.P. Lovecraft

He stumbled on things no mortal ought ever to know, and reached back through the years as no one ever should reach; and something came out of those years to engulf him.

That was when I waked half of Arkham with my screaming as I plunged madly up from the abyss of sleep.

I saw the body spread on that dank stone, And knew those things which feasted were not men; I knew this strange, grey world was not my own, But Yuggoth, past the starry voids—and then The body shrieked at me with a dead cry, And all too late I knew that it was I!

And because mere walls and windows must soon drive to madness a man who dreams and reads much

H.P. Lovecraft

H.P. Lovecraft

Madness was in all the Jermyns, and people were glad there were not many of them.

the sailor who broke down the door could perhaps have told frightful things if he had not forthwith gone completely mad—

So I tried to read, and soon became tremblingly absorbed by something I found in that accursed Necronomicon; a thought and a legend too hideous for sanity or consciousness.

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.

Down unlit and illimitable corridors of eldritch phantasy sweeps the black, shapeless Nemesis that drives me to self-annihilation.

Then a yell of utter, ultimate fright and stark madness wrenched from scores of human throats—a yell which came strong and clear despite the depth from which it must have burst; after which darkness and silence ruled all things.

God! Could it be possible that here lay the mortal relics of half the titan thinkers of all the ages; snatched by supreme ghouls from crypts where the world thought them safe, and subject to the beck and call of madmen who sought to drain their knowledge for some still wilder end whose ultimate effect would concern, as poor Charles had hinted in his frantic note, 'all civilisation, all natural law, perhaps even the fate of the solar system and the universe'?

But in that instant of curiosity was born the madly unreasoning desire which has brought me to this hell of confinement.

arcades of horror

There is method in my madness.

It is only the insane who achieve anything significant.

The world's full of people with unusual beliefs, Julia. Scientologists, Rastafarians, Catholics, Moonies, Mormons, Baptists, Tories, dentists, captains of industry—every madness has its cheerleader. The asylums and parliament are crammed full of delusionists, and only a madman would want to eliminate them.

The madness of writing was the antidote to true madness.

The mad were put in asylums, but the sane are worse off in their offices.

Act – make an event. Smash the coordinates and see where the smithereens fly. Let in the madness, and be sure to be a danger to oneself and others. Too much thinking turns you into that fool Hamlet.

The striking thing about the normal is that there is nothing normal about it: normality is the gentrification of ordinary madness—ask any Surrealist.