#madness

"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!"

"My soul is a black maelstrom, a great madness spinning about a vacuum, the swirling of a vast ocean around a hole in the void, and in the waters, more like whirlwinds than waters, float images of all I ever saw or heard in the world: houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and fragments of voices, all caught up in a sinister, bottomless whirlpool."

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

"There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"He stood up straight and looked the world squarely in the fields and hills. To add weight to his words he stuck the rabbit bone in his hair. He spread his arm out wide. "I will go mad!"he annouced."

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

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

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

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

"Absurdity is the ecstasy of intellectualism."

"This place has only three exits, sir: Madness, and Death."

"Much Madness Is Divinest SenseMuch Madness is divinest Sense —To a discerning Eye —Much Sense — the starkest Madness —'Tis the MajorityIn this, as All, prevail —Assent — and you are sane —Demur — you're straightway dangerous —And handled with a Chain —"

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

"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?"

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