Insanity Madness Quotes & Sayings

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

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

I personally could never come to terms with my label of 'Criminally Insane'. Just because of my violent outbursts in prison, don't mean to say I'm mad. Obviously I had become a disruptive element within the penal system. Uncontrollable! Unpredictable! But that don't make insanity! — Stephen Richards

His own naivety taunted him like a flicker of madness. — Jane Harper

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

I rehearsed Foucault's argument that the presence of madness on our doorstep is good for us, for it reminds us the life we live is only one among several human possibilities. — Michael Greenberg

It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane. — Philip K. Dick

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

I'm cold as a razor blade, inches from madness. — Elton John

Unlike most I don't fear prison, never have, never will. Obviously I don't want it, I hate it, but it's the hate that drives me on to survive. — Stephen Richards

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

Error in extremis - extremely pure, extremely persistent, or extremely peculiar - becomes insanity. madness is radical wrongness. — Kathryn Schulz

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 first part of madness is believing what you hear. The Second is acting on it. — Sam Hawksmoor

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

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

Julian spoke with the clear, unequivocal lucidity of madmen who have escaped the hypocrisy of having to abide by a reality that makes no sense. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

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

You can take care of him," she insisted. This was madness. This was a true example of temporary insanity.
"I can't."
"Why not?" She demanded.
"Umm ... I don't ... like ... " I couldn't say diapers. I had my own baby! "I don't like ... black ... babies ... — L.D. Davis

Ask anybody, would you want an ex-madman living next door? It's difficult enough being an ex-convict. It's double hard for us 'madmen'. Please believe it. — 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

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

April 43rd 2000
Today is the day of great triumph. There is a king of Spain. He has been found at last. That king is me. I only discovered this today. Frankly, it all came to me in a flash. — Nikolai Gogol

The supreme trick of mass insanity is that it persuades you that the only abnormal person is the one who refuses to join in the madness of others, the one who tries vainly to resist. We will never understand totalitarianism if we do not understand that people rarely have the strength to be uncommon. — Eugene Ionesco

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

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

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

It's madness, of course', thought Moist. 'But now I've got it, too. — Terry Pratchett

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

(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

Never be ashamed of madness, instead be ashamed of people that are ashamed of madness. Without a little bit of insanity, we would have never had the Theory of Relativity, electricity, airplanes, cars or your beloved iPhone. Madness got you that. — Shannon L. Alder

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

Looking back at the years I spent in the asylums, I'm now convinced some of that insanity rubbed off onto me! — Stephen Richards

Flirting with madness was one thing; when madness started flirting back, it was time to call the whole thing off. — Rohinton Mistry

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

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

I have felt the wind on the wing of madness. — Charles Baudelaire

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

Madness,' Nick called. 'That's all I've found here. Does Avalon breed insanity? Is that the nature of magic, to drive everyone out of their minds? — Brom

How do people know they are sane? Can a person be gripped by lunacy, only to be released a short time later, never to relive the episode again? — Dee Remy

When the world goes mad, one must accept madness as sanity; since sanity is, in the last analysis, nothing but the madness on which the whole world happens to agree. — George Bernard Shaw

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

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

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

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

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

Falling in love is not rational. It's madness. A beautiful, wonderful moment of magnificent insanity. — Michael Faudet

A doctor once asked me: 'Charlie, what do you think your problem is?' Doc,' I said, ' ... you're the problem! — Stephen Richards

Mad Hatter: "Why is a raven like a writing-desk?"
"Have you guessed the riddle yet?" the Hatter said, turning to Alice again.
"No, I give it up," Alice replied: "What's the answer?"
"I haven't the slightest idea," said the Hatter — Lewis Carroll

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

We all disapprove of prostitution; but we do not all approve of purity. The only way to discuss the social evil is to get at once to the social ideal. We can all see the national madness; but what is national sanity? — G.K. Chesterton

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

She sat in a secluded room, she was mad, but she could not accept it; so she was neither sane nor insane. She could not be either until she knew herself, so in limbo she must die. She kept stuffing toilet roll into her mouth. They found her choked to death! — Stephen Richards

Asylums are crazy places, with crazy rules. If you're not mad when you arrive, you are when you leave. (That's if you ever leave.) I was lucky ... I got slung out; they couldn't afford to keep me any longer. — 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

Life's contentment is like an abstract edifice with a domed ceiling of insanity — Munia Khan

There is madness in every single being, is there not? — Delia Winters

Madness is always fascinating, for it reveals the ungluing we all secretly fear: the mind taking off from the body, the possibility that the magnet that attaches us to a context in the world can lose its grip. — Molly Haskell

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

Men were always quick to believe in the madness of women. — Alison Goodman

He is mad about being small when you were big, but no, that's not it, he is mad about being helpless when you were powerful, but no, not that either, he is mad about being contingent when you were necessary, not quite it ... he is insane because when he loved you, you didn't notice. — Donald Barthelme

There are certain people in whom you can detect the seeds of madness - seeds that have remained dormant only because the people in question have lived relatively comfortable, middle class lives. They function perfectly well in the world, but you can imagine, given a nasty parent, or a prolonged bout of unemployment, how their potential for craziness might have been realized. — Zoe Heller

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

When a mad man found some certain way to express his insanity in original way, he would get promoted to be called an Artist ... Wait, are you talking about me? — Hiroko Sakai

Insanity destroys reason, but not wit. — Nathanael Emmons

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

He got a lovely pair of trainers given off his mum for Christmas, best pair he ever had, but it was the nylon laces that he couldn't take his eyes off. They found him hanging in his cell! — 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

Once upon a time there was a
Once upon a time there was a
Once upon a time there was a
Stop this. It's undignified. — N.K. Jemisin

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

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

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

Ever see moors murderer Ian Brady, study his photos, study Black, study Cannon, study Sutcliffe - study them all! Who says evil is not recognisable? — Stephen Richards

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

He was a young man of savage & unexpected originality, a diseased genius & quite frankly, a mad genius. Imbeciles grow insane & in their insanity the imbecility remains stagnant or agitated; in the madness of a man of genius some genius often remains: the form & not the quality of intelligence has been affected; the fruit has been bruised in the fall, but has preserved all its perfume & all the savor of its pulp, hardly too ripe. — Remy De Gourmont

Ethan trembled, waiting for the insanity to strike him from their level, medusan gazes. Nothing happened. After a moment, he unclutched the desk edge. Perhaps then the madness that possessed galactic men, slaves to these creatures, was something only transmitted in the flesh. Some incalculable telepathic aura? Bravely, he raised his eyes again to the figures in the screen.
So. That was a woman
two women, in fact. — Lois McMaster Bujold

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

There is no element of genius without some form of madness. — Leonardo DiCaprio

Some of the madmen are really fun to be with. I soon learnt to relate to them. I soon became one of them. I ended up the maddest of the mad. There is no madder than myself! Please believe it. — Stephen Richards

He was a silent type, very nervy of people: shy, introverted, nobody would believe he could scream so loud ... well he did drink a bottle of bleach! — 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

It is easy to identify a shallow person by the attention he gives to what will do him absolutely no good. — Michael Bassey Johnson

Madness is no madness when shared. — Zygmunt Bauman

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

In my madness I see your face in mine. — David Bowie

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

Maybe it's an insanity test, Haggis thought - if you believe it, you're automatically kicked out. He considered that possibility. But when he read it again, he decided, "This is madness. — Lawrence Wright

Those with the money are eccentric. Those without, insane. — Bruce Robinson

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

A madman overcomes it by adapting to his surroundings. You can't give up. Why die? There is always another mission; it's the missions that keep you alive. — Stephen Richards

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