Quotes & Sayings About Staying Sane

That is my sole mission: to not let my solitary confinement drive me to madness. I can let it harden me, I can let it toughen me, but I must not let it make me crazy. It's a strange challenge, staying sane. If you focus too hard on maintaining your sanity, the slipperiness of the task can only make you crazier. On the other hand, if you forget your mission, if you try to maintain your sanity by not thinking about the matter at all, you can find your mind wandering in such dizzying patterns that you wind up, again, at madness. The trick is to forge a middle ground between the two: a detachment, a state of neutrality. — Pittacus Lore

It's not exactly surprising that staying sane is useful when trying to hit performance markers. — John Scalzi

To write about the monstrous sense of alienation the poet feels in this culture of polarized hatreds is a way of staying sane. With the poem, I reach out to an audience equally at odds with official policy, and I celebrate our mutual humanness in an inhuman world. — Maxine Kumin

The extreme of flexibility is chaos and the extreme of being structured is rigid and staying sane, or indeed using your creativity, is about being aware of these extremes and steering yourself to areas where you work best which usually tend to be more in the middle than at either extreme edge. — Philippa Perry

You laughed either to keep yourself sane or because you'd given up on staying that way. Either way, you laughed. — Hugh Howey

Madness--that's all they have, after working sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. Going mad is their only way of staying sane. — J.G. Ballard

[Solitary confinement] is terrible. That is terrible. You're in a grave. You can't do anything. Everything's brought to you and you're in a room all day, except to come out of the showers. So when I would come out, I would entertain myself by singing, doing little mock concerts. And then when I was in the room, I would develop a routine. Like I have a lot of hair under here, so I would take my hair down and take all day to braid it on purpose. Stretch the hours out. Then I might write. And I would clean the floor. And I would look out the window. And then I'd devote a whole day to just reading. I was Christian then, trying to be. So I would read the whole Bible. I would break it down into sections. You're in a grave and you're trying to live. That's how to best describe it: trying to live in a grave. You're trying to live 'cause you're not dead yet, but nobody hears you when you call out, 'Hey, I'm alive! — Megan Sweeney

The days diminished. Light lasted just six hours, and it was a feeble light. Mabel organized her hours into patterns - wash, mend, cook, wash, mend, cook - and tried not to imagine floating beneath the ice like a yellow leaf. — Eowyn Ivey

I don't understand why young entrepreneurs feel this pressure to take venture capital or go public. Don't get me wrong: Public companies are A-OK with me. I just think there is another way. Staying private is a lot more sane. — Jack Dangermond

It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage. — George Orwell