quotations about madness
When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies?
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
Don Quixote
First sign of madness, talking to your own head.
J. K. ROWLING
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.
DON DELILLO
The Names
I sometimes think we must be all mad and that we shall wake to sanity in strait-waistcoats.
BRAM STOKER
Dracula
You have made the terrible mistake of seeing things as they should be and not as they are--that makes you a very sane madman.
TERRY WALSTROM
The Monorails of Mars
One knows one's madnesses, by and large. By and large the knowledge is vacuous. The notion of naming the beast to conquer it is the idiot optimism of psychotherapy.
GLEN DUNCAN
The Last Werewolf
Somewhere in the depths of solitude, beyond wilderness and freedom, lay the trap of madness.
EDWARD ABBEY
The Monkey Wrench Gang
Madness is not real; what is real is audiences' response to and labeling of certain actors and behaviors as "mad."
CAROL A. B. WARREN
Court of Last Resort: Mental Illness and the Law
It's better to face madness with a plan than to sit still and let it take you in pieces.
JOSH MALERMAN
Bird Box
I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.
SYLVIA PLATH
"Elm", Ariel
There are so many kinds of madness, so many ways in which the human brain may go wrong; and so often it happens that what we call madness is both reasonable and just. It is so. Yes. A little reason is good for us, a little more makes wise men of some of us--but when our reason over-grows us and we reach too far, something breaks and we go insane.
JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD
"The Case of Beauvais", Back to God's Country and Other Stories
Anger is a brief madness.
HORACE
Epistles
And what is an authentic madman? It is a man who preferred to become mad, in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society
Madness is not ours alone, but part of the human condition; we cannot segregate it over there apart from our own lives.
ANN BELFORD ULANOV
Madness and Creativity
Even if one understands that what one is doing is mad, it is indeed still madness.
GUILLERMO DEL TORO & CHUCK HOGAN
The Fall
In ancient Greek culture, the image of madness is that of a black, angry, inner flood. The organic source of madness is black liquid. It seethes up from below, manifesting itself in uncontrolled passion, illness, and violence. It rebels against order and tradition. It wanders from its natural course. And in some instances ... the madness passes, and the mad are left to contemplate the destruction they have wrought.
GARY ROSENSHIELD
Pushkin and the Genres of Madness: The Masterpieces of 1833
The premonition of madness is complicated by the fear of lucidity in madness, the fear of the moments of return and reunion, when the intuition of disaster is so painful that it almost provokes a greater madness.... One would welcome chaos if one were not afraid of lights in it.
EMIL CIORAN
On the Heights of Despair
The constitution of madness as a mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, affords the evidence of a broken dialogue, posits the separation as already effected, and thrusts into oblivion all those stammered, imperfect words without fixed syntax in which the exchange between madness and reason was made. The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue of reason about madness, has been established only on the basis of such a silence.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
preface, Madness and Civilization
And men, whose reason long was blind,
From cells of madness unconfined,
Oft lose whole years of darker mind.
ALFRED TENNYSON
The Two Voices
When man deploys the arbitrary nature of his madness, he confronts the dark necessity of the world; the animal that haunts his nightmares and his nights of privation is his own nature, which will lay bare hell's pitiless truth.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
Madness & Civilization