Quotes About Madness

And I'm thinking about the old man. He'll be pounding on the glass right about now... or maybe not now. Maybe in a while. But he'll be pounding and... will there be blood? I like to imagine so. Yes, I rather think there will be blood. Lots of blood. Blood in extraordinary quantities.

We aren't contractually tied down to rationality! There is no sanity clause!

We aren't contractually tied down to rationality! There is no sanity clause! So when you find yourself locked onto an unpleasant train of thought, heading for the places in your past where the screaming is unbearable, remember there's always madness. Madness is the emergency exit. You can just step outside, and close the door on all those dreadful things that happened. You can lock them away… Forever.

I studied him and realized that madness is the last defence of the mind when it can't hope to reconcile itself with events; I too was standing between routine and the unknowable.

The eternal cycle, the beginning, middle and end of a human being, the incomprehensible dance in the magic of our own theatre will continue forever. But ignorance of our birth and death makes us largely mad; the majority of us clap at our disasters as though they are a play: but it is a work we cannot possibly understand.

Most men are within a finger's breadth of being mad.

One has, I am now certain, to be a little mad to see into the past or the future, to be a little abridged of life to know life, the obscure life – darkly seen.

Anybody remotely interesting is mad, in some way or another.

Southern California is the land of crazy crimes.

Sanity may be madness but the maddest of all is to see life as it is and not as it should be.

Too much sanity may be madness - and the maddest of all - to see life as it is, and not as it ought to be.

You know what you did? You embraced the insanity you were telling us about. – Don DeLillo, Great Jones Street

Why are we fighting them? --They're mad. We're sane. --How do we know? --That we're sane? --Yes. --Am I sane? --To all appearances. --And you, do you consider yourself sane? --I do. --Well, there you have it. --But don't they also consider themselves sane? --I think they know. Deep down. That they're not sane. --How must that make them feel? --Terrible, I should think. They must fight ever more fiercely, in order to deny what they know to be true. That they are not sane.

The only performance that makes it, that really makes it, that makes it all the way is the one that achieves madness.

There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.

And yet I adore him. I think he's quite crazy, and with no place or occupation in life, and far from happy, and philosophically irresponsible – and there is absolutely nobody like him.

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad.

Everything that had happened was shockingly beautiful, enough to make you crazy.

To put meaning in one's life may end in madness, But life without meaning is the torture Of restlessness and vague desire-It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.

Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane.

Life, this endless conversation with yourself. Silent in sanity, audible in madness.

When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies?

Life is beautiful but people are crazy.

My life has crept so long on a broken wing Through cells of madness, haunts of horror and fear, That I come to be grateful at last for a little thing.