Quotes & Sayings About Insanity And Madness

I took a few dragging steps toward the locker-room door. 'You're doing something to me that I wouldn't do to a dog,' I mumbled. 'What you're doing to me is worse than if you were to kill me. You're locking me up in shadows for the rest of my life. You're taking my mind away from me. You're condemning me slowly but surely to madness, to being without a mind. It won't happen right away, but sooner or later, in six months or in a year - Well, I guess that's that.'
I fumbled my way out of the locker room and down the passageway outside, guiding myself with one arm along the wall, and past the sergeant's desk and down the steps, and then I was out in the street.
("All At Once, No Alice") — Cornell Woolrich

Madness is freedom and some may only perceive its Insanity. — J. Limbu

Insanity is a very lonely and empty existence - it's painfully true. They may laugh and smile, and skip and dance, but behind all the faces there is hollowness like a bottomless pit. The living dead, depression is a terrible illness, so is psychosis, the mentally inflicted beyond cure. — Stephen Richards

Acid gave me a clinical, unblinking look at madness, and I discovered I wasn't brave enough to be insane. — Craig Ferguson

Anyway, madness and genius. They're the disturbed pals of the human condition. The Bonnie and Clyde, the Thelma and Louise, the baking soda and vinegar. Insanity just walks alongside the brilliant like some creepy, insistent shadow. — Deb Caletti

Broadmoor creeps into your blood, the walls touch the sky and the grounds suck you in, they've even got their own burial ground. We called it the 'madman's hole', it smelt of fear; a stillness and even the birds seemed to have a stone face like their eyes were made of marble. So many monsters, men of hell, I don't know how a sane man can keep sane in there. — Stephen Richards

In the gray world above, I hear myself howling with laughter. Far below me, in the psychic abyss that is part of the Darkness, I hear another howling, one full of joy and pain, rage and celebration.
Not just another witch is coming, my foolish Sisters, but Witch. — Anne Bishop

Owing to the disabilities of the two major sovereigns, one incapacitated by alcohol and the other by insanity, the result was not what it might have been. Renewed madness was already darkening Charles's mind when he arrived and in the brief intervals when he was lucid, Wenceslas was drunk. — Barbara W. Tuchman

It is a proven fact that everyone on this earth has some bit of madness within their soul. I am no exception and neither are you. — Matthew Hunt

This was the age of the industrial revolution, science was becoming the new religion and it was therefore natural that large numbers of the medical profession firmly believed in a mechanistic explanation for madness... Insanity was a disease and thus naturally something that doctors alone were qualified to treat. — Neil Evans

The process of writing and directing drives you to such extremes that it's natural to feel an affinity with insanity. I approach that madness as something dangerous, and I'm afraid, but also I want to go to it, to see what's there, to embrace it. I don't know why, but I'm drawn. — Dario Argento

This place has only three exits, sir: Madness, and Death. — Rene Daumal

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

I stood balanced on the brink of madness. Insanity and longevity are a truly terrifying combination; if I gave in now, I might pay the price for centuries to come. — C.S. Friedman

We're built of contradictions, all of us. It's those opposing forces that give us strength, like an arch, each block pressing the next. Give me a man whose parts are all aligned in agreement and I'll show you madness. We walk a narrow path, insanity to each side. A man without contradictions to balance him will soon veer off. — Mark Lawrence

My girl was mad and I loved her. Upon a night, she read my poetry; and kissing me madly she cried, 'You are a genius, my love!' To which I replied, 'My girl,' whispering, 'Every doctor in this land with a prescription pad is more of a genius than I. — Roman Payne

How crazy craziness makes everyone, how irrationally afraid. The madness hidden in each of us, called to, identified, aroused like a lust. And against that the jaw sets. The more I fear my own insanity the more I must punish yours ... — Kate Millett

The human race will last. Everywhere and forever, for it will never be sane and only insanity is divine. Only the mad destroy themselves and all they have wrought.
And only the phoenix lives forever. — Fredric Brown

And what would they find on sale? His sanity? Could be. Half-Price. Smoke and Water Damage. Everything Must Go. — Stephen King

How stand I, then,
That have a father killed, a mother stained,
Excitements of my reason and my blood,
And let all sleep, while to my shame I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men
That for a fantasy and trick of fame
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain? O, from this time forth
My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth!
He exits. — William Shakespeare

Was I ever crazy? Maybe. Or maybe life is ... Crazy isn't being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It's you or me amplified. If you ever told a lie and enjoyed it. If you ever wished you could be a child forever. They were not perfect, but they were my friends. — Susanna Kaysen

I'll tell you what I want. Magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misinterpret things to them. I don't tell the truth. I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it! - Don't turn the light on! — Tennessee Williams

The asylum years taught me a lot about myself. Bear in mind I'm the only lunatic in the United Kingdom who spent time in all three max secure asylums, which you should now know are ... Rampton, Broadmoor and Ashworth. Don't ask me which is the best or the worst, as how do you compare insanity with insanity? — Stephen Richards

But these people _announced_ their madness ... they flaunted their insanity, they weren't half mad and half not, curled around a door frame. They were properly mad in the Shakespearean sense, talking sense when you least expected it. — Zadie Smith

A loon thought he was Frank Sinatra and every time Frank came on TV or radio the loon would go mad, impostor! — Stephen Richards

During the Renaissance there was a renewed interest in the relationship between genius, melancholia, and madness. A stronger distinction was made between sane melancholies of high achievement and individuals whose insanity prevented them from using their ability. The eighteenth century witnessed a sharp change in attitude; balance and rational thought, rather than "inspiration" and emotional extremes, were seen as the primary components of genius. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Madness is a bowl of poison cherries, chew them and die, but you die screaming in agony. — Stephen Richards

Take outside - freedom. What is it? What does it mean to a madman? I'll tell you, we go years through a lifetime with no love, no sex, no nice food and no nice clothes. So when it comes ... we choke on it! The kindness strangles us; we can't cope, so we make pigs of ourselves. — Stephen Richards

The two halves of my barely whole being rioted, chained in place and snarling in protest of the other's presence. The bondage allowed them just close enough to drive each other to venomous rebellion, yet never permitting the chance to make contact; to fight. There would be no battle, no resolution. The end result sounded more and more like insanity. So this is love? It truly is mad ... — Aubrea Summer

So what causes men to become violent? I'll tell you, boredom, silly rules, muggy screws and pathetic governors. What else can we do - swallow it, wipe our mouths out. You have to fight for your rights. Not sit back and take it. — Stephen Richards

Time and I have quarrelled. All hours are midnight now. I had a clock and a watch, but I destroyed them both. I could not bear the way they mocked me. — Susanna Clarke

I got both hands on her throat and there was nothing inside me but the black madness of that desire to kill her, to close my hands until she turned purple and lay still and there'd be an end to her forever. Let them send me to the chair. Let 'em burn me. All they could do was kill me. — Charles Williams

Forced to recognize our inhumanity, our reason coexists with our insanity. And though we choose between reality and madness, it's either sadness or euphoria. — Billy Joel

What if the insane are too raw to know which stations are real and which are just confused static? — Kate Scelsa

You can grow up being a troublemaker and then before you know it the next thing you're doing is listening to Frank Zappa whilst chilling out ... now that's the intelligent way out. What would a psychiatrist say about that? — Stephen Richards

I went through a period where I couldn't keep off the establishment's roofs, it was a serious urge I had. To look at a drainpipe and start shaking with excitement, nobody knows the feeling of hitting a prison roof, not unless you've done it. Let me tell you, it's like a lotto win - it's power. You're the governor; it's a kick in the teeth to the system. — Stephen Richards

His terror became his companion. When it seemed to diminish, or grow easier to bear, he forced himself to remember the details of what he had said and done so that his fears returned, redoubled. His previous life, which had been without fear, he now dismissed as an illusion since he had come to believe that only in fear could the truth be found. When he woke from sleep without anxiety, he asked himself, What is wrong? What is missing? And then his door opened slowly, and a child put its head around and gazed at him: there are wheels, Ned thought, wheels within wheels. The curtains were now always closed, for the sun horrified him: he was reminded of a film he had seen some time before, and how the brightness of the noonday light had struck the water where a man, in danger of drowning, was struggling for his life. — Peter Ackroyd

It's maybe impossible to escape (your own head), but I guess the secret is the prison cell just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and prettier and prettier and prettier. — David Lynch

One lunatic in Rampton used to have bouts of hysteria. Where he would let out a scream, and run at a wall and dive headfirst ... crash! He was given a crash helmet! (Well it is a mad house.) — Stephen Richards

Every town has a psychopath or two. Not just the everyday crazy person, either. Not like Crazy Larry, the paint huffing weirdo peddling around town on a child-sized Huffy ranting about the end of the world, or the old lady dressed in rags who hands out filthy doll clothes to the kiddies. I'm talking about the cold, never remorseful lunatic, who may never have seemed insane up until the day he hacked apart his mother and shoved her stinking corpse into the attic. This town is overflowing with them; bloodcurdling murderers like Kenny Wayne Hilbert, Charlie Fender ... Orland Winthro. And Al, the crazy had to come from somewhere. — Nikki Ferguson

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

Emotions had welled close to the surface, and she thought her heart had never felt so full as it did standing next to the defiled grave of a whore while lunatics sang the national anthem. — Mindy McGinnis

The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God. — Herman Melville

The cab driver is staring at me in his mirror. I'm talking to myself.
"The second sign of madness," I explain.
"What's the first one?"
"Killing lots of people and eating their genitals."
He laughs and sneaks another look at me. — Michael Robotham

There are times when the mind is dealt such a blow it hides itself in insanity. While this may not seem beneficial, it is. There are times when reality is nothing but pain, and to escape that pain the mind must leave reality behind. — Patrick Rothfuss

Dictatorships, wars, and cruelty drive whole countries to madness. My theory is that the human species was crazy from the very first and that civilization and culture are only enhancing man's insanity.
A Tale of Two Sisters — Isaac Bashevis Singer

Weird how I can feel so frail and tiny sometimes, and other times so brave and bold and reckless and free, and ... Does everybody feel the same? When people get grown-up, do they always feel grown-up and sensible and sorted out and ... And do I want to feel grown-up? Do I want to stop feeling ... paradoxical, nonsensical? Do I want to stop being crackers? Do I want to be destrangified? O yes, sometimes I want nothing more - but it only lasts a moment, then O I want to be the strangest and crakerest of everybody. — David Almond

The manic relief that comes from the fantasy that we can with one savage slash cut the chains of the past and rise like a phoenix, free of all history, is generally a tipping point into insanity, akin to believing that we can escape the endless constraints of gravity, and fly off a tall building. "I'm freeeee ... SPLAT!". — Stefan Molyneux

Nothing can be more slightly defined than the line of demarcation between sanity and insanity ... Make the definition too narrow, it becomes meaningless; make it too wide, and the whole human race becomes involved in the dragnet. In strictness we are all mad when we give way to passion, to prejudice, to vice, to vanity; but if all the passionate, prejudiced and vain people were to be locked up as lunatics, who is to keep the key to the asylum?
(Editorial, The Times, 22 July 1853) — Kate Summerscale

Psychiatry's a young science. Yesterday's madman may be tomorrow's genius. Beethoven and Van Gogh were both a bit loopy. In my view, most madmen are remarkable. They're explorers, travelers beyond the rim of consciousness. Not surprising if they pick up a few bugs and get sick. That's all it is, madness. Mad just means sick. If you get fluid on the lungs it's pleurisy. If it's fluid on the brain, it's insanity. — Clare Boylan

When you can no longer differentiate between the insanity spewed onto the blank page, and the madness evident in the all-but shattered mirror ... that's when you know you're doing it right. — Dave Matthes

Suddenly, madness was everywhere, and I was determined to learn about the impact it had on the way society evolves. I've always believed society to be a fundamentally rational thing, but what if it isn't? What if it is built on insanity? — Jon Ronson

In Dostoevsky there were things unbelievable and not to be believed, but some so true they changed you as you read them; frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness, and the insanity of gambling were there to know as you knew the landscape and the roads in turgenev — Ernest Hemingway,

Prison madness is much the same! Insanity is plentiful in prisons. These days with the drug culture it's not a lot of difference, as a lot of convicts make themselves psychotic and paranoid. Many end up killers, all over petty and minor problems. Where men would once squabble, fight and kill over a ½ oz of bacca they now do the same over a gram of white powder or a bag of brown! — Stephen Richards

If evil lingers around you, it will rub off on you, it will cause stress, anxiety and a lot of mental anguish! 'Eyes' - you can see evil in the eye of the beholder! Body! Talk! Stance! Walk! Posture! Evil oozes out! — Stephen Richards

Insanity, blood-soaked death, murderous aggression, this is who the Psy were before Silence. No other race, it is said, bred more vicious, more intelligent, or more sadistic serial killers. But worse was the clawing madness that destroyed so many of them, saints and sinners alike, until it became known as the flip side to their incredible psychic gifts. — Nalini Singh

Dramatic uprising of stupidity can start from nowhere and only be seen when it reaches it's climax. — Auliq Ice

Perhaps I am too tame, too domestic a magician. But how does one work up a little madness? I meet with mad people every day in the street, but I never thought before to wonder how they got mad. Perhaps I should go wandering on lonely moors and barren shores. That is always a popular place for lunatics - in novels and plays at any rate. Perhaps wild England will make me mad. — Susanna Clarke

Evil is there, out there and in your faces! You have two choices, either run or fight! To run is to die a coward! To fight is to win! — Stephen Richards

She thought of the recurrent waves of pain that for some reason or other she and her husband had had to endure; of the invisible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable fashion; of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of this tenderness, which is either crushed or wasted, or transformed into madness; of neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners; of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer. — Vladimir Nabokov

So if all what I've said is the definition of insanity then the next thing is how do you define an evil bastard? People can mix evil and insanity up, thinking both to be the one and self same thing ... wrong! Let me tell you about evil, first you smell it, secondly you feel it, thirdly you taste it and finally you need to destroy it. — Stephen Richards

(Her husband's departure ... ) had picked Mildred up by the hair and dropped her down at the doorstep of insanity.
From Butterfly on F street — Edward P. Jones

There is a duality to darkness known only to those who've been infected by its touch. Everyone knows the shadows: shallow, comfortable, mostly harmless places where one might nest for a night. But the depths of living pitch only visit the aristocracy of madmen and women who've unwittingly pledged fealty to the curse. For some, it outright ruins minds like a hound to fresh meat; for others, it wanes into the deepest parts of its less caustic sibling and waits for the time to strike, returning periodically through life like an incurable disease. — Darrell Drake

Madness is forever! We even smell different, our hearts don't beat, they tick, our eyes are different, we don't just see, we also pick up vibes. We are probably dehumanised and way past our 'sell by' date, totally unusable, bitter as lemons. — Stephen Richards

So, yeah, insane people give me hope. Courage to go on being sane and alive, always with the cure at hand, should I ever tire and need it: madness. — Ray Bradbury

Fuck the rabbit, eat it and go after a lion. — Stephen Richards

Thus, his ambition led him not to relieve his patients' madness, but to exasperate it - to let it breathe with a life of its own. And this he did in certain ways that wholly eradicated what human attributes remained in these people. But sometimes that peculiar magic he saw in their eyes would seem to fade, and then he would institute his 'proper treatment,' which consisted of putting them through a battery of hellish ordeals intended to loosen their attachment to the world of humanity and to project them further into the realm of the 'silent, staring universe' where the insanity of the infinite might work a rather paradoxical cure. The result was something as pathetic as a puppet and as exalted as the stars, something at once dead and never dying, a thing utterly without destiny and thus imperishable, forever consigned to that abysmal vacuity which is the essence of all that is immortal. — Thomas Ligotti

Now, I would say to myself, you are feeling alienated from people and unlike other people, therefore you are projecting your discomfort onto them. When you look at a face, you see a blob of rubber because you are worried that your face is a blob of rubber.
This clarity made me able to behave normally, which posed some interesting questions. Was everybody seeing this stuff and acting as though they weren't? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act? If some people didn't see these things, what was the matter with them? Were they blind or something? These questions had me unsettled. — Susanna Kaysen

Insanity destroys reason, but not wit. — Nathanael Emmons

They ask themselves: "What will he do?" "How will he react?" "Will he go mad?" "Will he bite?" "Will he be armed?" They're pumped up with fear. Adrenaline pumping, fingers tense on the trigger, brains racing. And I'm cool as a cat! The name 'Charles Bronson' causes panic! The name 'Mickey Peterson' causes stress! The police all love to arrest me, as I'm the most exciting madman they will ever arrest! It's a fact. So here I am years later, and I'm still the madman. There is no escaping my past. — Stephen Richards

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 so
ordinary that the whippers are in love too. — William Shakespeare

Oh! how near are genius and madness! Men imprison them and chain them, or raise statues to them. — Denis Diderot

Because we are limited in our knowledge, even the sanest of us are slightly insane. Our limitations are a kind of madness, and we can only choose to deny we are mad, and so descend into a dark spiral of total insanity, or accept we are mad and embark on a quest to regain our true and wholesome sanity — Dwight Longenecker

There are different categories of madmen, and different types of asylums! I know absolutely nothing about the asylums that house the madman who thinks he is a space man. Would you believe that 90% of madmen are treated in outside clinics? — Stephen Richards

He had found in himself the perfect, undeniable case of insanity. He possessed wisdom, patience, tolerance, truthfulness, loyalty, and moral fortitude - all the qualities that go to make an utter madman. — Machado De Assis

Was I insane? Maybe. But then, there are many different kinds of insanity. Aunt Rose had always taken for granted that the whole world was in a state of constantly fluctuating madness, and that a neurosis was not an illness, but a fact of life, like pimples. Some have more, some have less, but only truly abnormal people have none at all. — Anne Fortier

Love was insanity at its most beautiful - a madness of desperation and desire that made the most improbable choice possible. — A Meredith Walters

I know there is a thin silver line between the sane and the insane, and even in that realm of madness, there are degrees of reason, fluttering moments of clarity and truth. Maybe the world can't handle the their truth. Maybe we are too weak. Maybe, like Sloth used to say, It's the blind who see the most. — Julie Cantrell

They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me. — Nathaniel Lee

Was I insane? Maybe. But then, there were many different kinds of insanity. Aunt Rose had always taken for granted that the whole world was in a state of constantly fluctuating madness, and that a neurosis was not an illness, but a fact of life, like pimples. Some have more, some have less, but only truly abnormal people have none at all. This commonsense philosophy had consoled me many times before, and it did now, too. — Anne Fortier

Nowadays I just don't care; I've taken the Frank Zappa stance. I am who I am! Some love me, some loathe me, some respect me and some despise me. But after all that's been, I still love the insane! As they're exciting, dangerous and highly explosive! For me mad dogs are gentlemen. — Stephen Richards

Sex and love they choose the different paths. Love always leads to devotion, sacrifice, and dedication, which are forms of insanity and madness; but sex it is always about comfort, pleasure and power. — M.F. Moonzajer

Suicides - you read of it ... but you don't know the truth, if you were to see it you would go insane! Cut throats, cut wrists, hangings, suffocating, eyes bulging and tongues protruding, more shit. Suicides always shit themselves, did you know that! Life's final shit, the final act of madness; smell that you rats! Clean me up you pigs, zip me up in the bag you scum and get me out of here ... Get me the fuck out of here ... get me out! — Stephen Richards

You get used to the brain being squeezed. At nighttime in the darkness of your emptiness, it seems to swell back up and gives you some peace. In the darkness even the pain is not so bad. A bruise heals. (Time is the treatment.) But it's your mind that's tortured. Your thoughts are in turmoil and despair. Feelings of awesome revenge and destruction manifest themselves. — Stephen Richards

Madness was all very well if you were Alma and in a profession where insanity was a desirable accessory, a kind of psycho-bling. You couldn't get away with it down Martin's Yard, though. In the reconditioning business there was no real concept of delightful eccentricity. You'd find yourself as the recipient of a pharmaceutical lobotomy provided on the National Health, as a result of which your waistband would expand as your abilities to think, talk and respond to stimuli contracted. This — Alan Moore

You will certainly grant me that neither antiquity nor whatever nation has devised a more repulsive and blasphemous absurdity than that of eating your God. This is the most disgusting dogma of Christian religion, the greatest insult to the Highest Being, the climax of madness and insanity. — Frederick The Great

Sometimes I stare into a pool of piss, I see my reflection, I picture a hole in my face, there's nothing there, it's vanished. I watch the maggots turn to flies, and they fly off with bits of flesh from my body. I attempt to wipe it clear from my mind, but the nice thoughts get swallowed up. I can't think nice for too long ... it would destroy me. — Stephen Richards

Which one hadn't he walked down? Was it Barkovitch? Collie Parker? Percy What'shisname? Who was it? 'GARRATY!' the crowd screamed deliriously. 'GARRATY, GARRATY, GARRATY!'
Was it Scramm? Gribble? Davidson? A hand on his shoulder. Garraty shook it off impatiently. The dark figure beckoned, beckoned in the rain, beckoned for him to come and walk, to come and play the game. And it was time to get started. There was still so far to walk. — Richard Bachman

Writing sustains me. But wouldn't it be better to say it sustains this kind of life? Which doesn't mean life is any better when I don't write. On the contrary, it is far worse, wholly unbearable, and inevitably ends in madness. This is, of course, only on the assumption that I am a writer even when I don't write - which is indeed the case; and a non-writing writer is, in fact, a monster courting insanity. — Franz Kafka

He's no idiot, in fact he's a genius... and that's as far from an idiot as you can get without reaching madness. — Mike Judge

Vaughn is talking about the heat, and his voice is so excited that it breaks into whispers at times. He loves his madness the way a bird loves the sky. — Lauren DeStefano

Perhaps it was only that I did not feel any crazier than I had ever felt. I did not notice any missing gray tissue, I did not seem to be thinking any slower or more strangely, and so far I'd had no conversations with invisible buddies that I was aware of. Except in my sleep, of course-and did that really count? Weren't we all crazy in our sleep? What was sleep, after all, but the process by which we dumped our insanity into a dark subconscious pit and came out on the other side ready to eat cereal instead of the neighbor's children? — Jeff Lindsay

Her world fragmented into dozens of sharp, cutting shards, shedding the salty blood and saltier tears that ringed the bitter cocktail of her despair. She was caterpillar and butterfly, both, caught in a cocoon of raw nerves and open sores; she was insanity, wrapped up in the thin, transient wrappings of a temporary lucidity; and she was afraid, because an innate desire lay in the bottom reaches of her psyche for the very poison that was killing her. — Nenia Campbell

Sanity is very rare; every man almost and every woman has a dash of madness. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Madness is like an alternative residence. When sanity chases you out of home, take shelter in madness. — Munia Khan

I think of us as a people who inoculate ourselves against a plague of insanity with a powerful anti-idiotic called science fiction. I think sf is a literature which by its very nature requires that you be at least a little sane, that you know at least a little something. You must abdicate the right to be ignorant in order to enjoy science fiction, which most people are unwilling to do; and you must learn, if not actually how to think things through, at least what the trick looks like when it's done. Frequent injections will keep a lot of madness away. — Spider Robinson