#madness

"We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter"

"My wish is that you may be loved to the point of madness."

"I turned to Dionysus. "You cured him?""Madness is my specialty. It was quite simple.""But...you did something nice. Why?"He raised and eyebrow. "I am nice! I simple ooze niceness, Perry Johansson. Haven't you noticed?"

"Who but the mad would choose to keep on living? In the end, aren't we all just a little crazy?"

"The cries of the dead are terrible indeed; you should try not to hear them."

"Though the ancient poet in Plutarch tells us we must not trouble the gods with our affairs because they take no heed of our angers and disputes, we can never enough decry the disorderly sallies of our minds."

"Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule."

"I made a sorry face in response to such strong insistence, but I couldn’t believe him. Fantasies were exactly that..…..fantasies. Whimsy. Wishes. Mere castles in the sky without foundation or substance. Dreams didn’t come true. To believe so would be to believe falsely, to surrender to madness, to give in to an unreliable hope that would crush me once again as it always, always did!"

"Perhaps love is a minor madness. And as with madness, it's unendurable alone. The one person who can relieve us is of course the sole person we cannot go to: the one we love. So instead we seek out allies, even among strangers and wives, fellow patients who, if they can't touch the edge of our particular sorrow, have felt something that cuts nearly as deep."

"You don't seem mad at all,' she said.But I am, although I'm undergoing a cure, because my problem is that I lack a particular chemical. However, while I hope that the chemical gets rid of my chronic depression, I want to continue being mad, living life the way I dream it, and not the way other people want it to be. Do you know what exists out there, beyond the walls of Villete?"

"But maybe that isn't possible. Maybe the mind of the majority is always the healthy mind, simply by virtue of its numbers. Maybe it's the definition of madness to believe I'm right and everyone else if wrong, to find my thoughts rational and reasonable when almost the entire world finds them damaged and flawed."

"Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!"

"True, nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am, but why will say that I am mad?! The disease had sharpened my senses, not destroyed, not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute."

"Love is merely a madness; and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punish'd and cured is that the lunacy is soordinary that the whippers are in love too."

"To have the beginning of a truly great story, you need to have a character you're completely and utterly obsessed with. Without obsession, to the point of a maddening addiction,there's no point to continue."

"It is only through mystery and madness that the soul is revealed"

"Doubt … is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness."

"When love is not madness it is not love."

"Absurdity is the ecstasy of intellectualism."

"excuse my enthusiasm or rather madness, for I am really drunk with intellectual vision whenever I take a pencil or graver into my hand."