Best 930 quotes in «madness quotes» category

It takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.

It was an endless, consuming nightmare that she escaped only in madness. And then the escape was not complete. Part of her knew, always.

It was heart-shaking. Glorious. Torches, dizziness, singing. Wolves howling around us and a bull bellowing in the dark. The river ran white. It was like a film in fast motion, the moon waxing and waning, clouds rushing across the sky. Vines grew from the ground so fast they twined up the trees like snakes; seasons passing in the wink of an eye, entire years for all I know. . . . Mean we think of phenomenal change as being the very essence of time, when it's not at all. Time is something which defies spring and water, birth and decay, the good and the bad, indifferently. Something changeless and joyous and absolutely indestructible. Duality ceases to exist; there is no ego, no 'I,' and yet it's not at all like those horrid comparisons one sometimes hears in Eastern religions, the self being a drop of water swallowed by the ocean of the universe. It's more as if the universe expands to fill the boundaries of the self. You have no idea how pallid the workday boundaries of ordinary existence seem, after such an ecstasy.

It was past eight on a Friday night, so calling the Homeward to speak to Dr. Casbus was out of the question. The head nurse would never bother him this late. A sly idea struck me. Just because I couldn’t call the doctor, didn’t mean I couldn’t go see him in person. I’d gone to the Homeward at night before. On those nights when I’d been afraid for my mother, afraid she’d be scared, or missing me, or they would be hurting her with their treatments. The head nurse, Mrs. Huds didn’t like it, but Casbus always showed up to save me from her lecture on rules. He didn’t let me have a room to stay in—it wasn’t the Holiday Inn, but he’d let me stay long enough to dial down my fears a notch or two. And sometimes, I learned more about myself, like the last after-hours session, when Casbus had explained why I had holes in my memories.

It was such a heavenly dream: dreamed between the reality of war and the reality of hereditary madness.

It was while I was seated in an easy-chair in the street the following evening, smoking, watching the combustion of this structure, that something was suddenly born in me, something out of Hell, and I smiled a smile that never man smiled. And I said: 'I will burn: I will return to London...

it was times like these when a man in a desperate situation must take whatever madness is offered to escape the darker madness in which he finds himself trapped.

It would be superfluous to drive us mad, my dear Watson

It would be well to realize that the talk of ‘humane methods of warfare’, of the ‘rules of civilized warfare’, and all such homage to the finer sentiments of the race are hypocritical and unreal, and only intended for the consumption of stay-at-homes. There are no humane methods of warfare, there is no such thing as civilized warfare; all warfare is inhuman, all warfare is barbaric; the first blast of the bugles of war ever sounds for the time being the funeral knell of human progress… What lover of humanity can view with anything but horror the prospect of this ruthless destruction of human life. Yet this is war: war for which all the jingoes are howling, war to which all the hopes of the world are being sacrificed, war to which a mad ruling class would plunge a mad world.

I've always said women are vicious creatures - Detective Zach Grimes

I wanted to throw off the chains that bound me and give my entire being to someone. I wanted to know what it felt like to love another so much that the whole world came crashing down around me when it ended. I wanted obsession. I wanted madness. I wanted something all-consuming. And now that I realized it, I didn’t think that I would ever be the same again. And that terrified me.

I want to be loved so badly, it verges on mild insanity.

I was, a near grown man, sat in his dank, dark and rickety digs, feverishly hovering about the glare of a computer screen like a disorientated moth, one searching for a flaming light of recognition from someone/anyone!

I was frightened of myself, I seemed to have no control over my thoughts and feelings, it was like a sort of madness...

I was in the situation of someone who has assumed, all his life, that madness was on eway, and suddenly in its grip, discovers that it is not only different from the way he'd imagined but that the person suffering from it is someone else, and that this someone else is not interested in finding out what madness is like: he is simply immersed in it, or it has descended on him, and that's that.

I was standing alone with him when she burst impetuously through the door, tall and wearing a rain-cape on top of a queen's costume, a forgotten crown on her head. She directed some rapid words at him. He began to tremble all over and dropped my hand from under his arm. Vera seized me cruelly by the arm and led me off... She led me through murky, dusty expanses, between strange machinery and constructions, through valleys and mountains and past a precarious wood to her dressing-room. And she still held me cruelly by the arm. There she slammed the door shut, rudely chasing away some handsome women with the amorous eyes of worshipers. I do not recall her words. It was as though she were all aflame. She kissed my hands and I realized then that she had seen only me that evening, that she had performed for only me, that she loved me and that this was all such madness. ("Thirty-Three Abominations")

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.

I was walking around in an almost blind, crazy rage of madness. There was a story burning a hole in my brain, and it was dying to come out on paper. It was begging of me to create it, but I didn’t know where to begin. A month after giving birth to the idea, I felt like I was losing my mind. Ideas would pop into my head in the middle of the night, or during a midterm, and I missed them, quite narrowly, almost every time. Every time an idea left my mind without taking the shape of a word on paper, my mind would automatically begin to churn something just as impressive, or at least close to it. I was digging myself into a shallow grave, and I was getting nowhere. And this was even before the thoughts were committed to paper.

I will drive the world crazy with love poems for you. So they can know how magnificent you are and how crazy I am.

I wear the universe backwards. I imagine putting stars in my coffee, and sugar in the sky. I imagine going fishing in clouds, and watching the sun hide behind lakes. I'm too busy dancing with my imagination to even tip toe with reality for a second. They say I'm going mad. They're right.

Livet består av en del galskap, og en del visdom; den som bare skriver ærbødig og konvensjonelt, utelater mer enn halvparten.

I will put warm woolen socks on the feet of the people in the other world; but I dream and cannot wake, and I am cast over the cliff and hang there by two fingers that are danced and trampled on by the giant unreality.

I wondered what sort of woman loved a man like that.

Love is never enough. Madness is enough. It is complete, sufficient unto itself. You can only stand outside it as a woman might stand outside a prison in which her lover is locked up. From time to time, a well-loved face will peer out and love floods back. A scrap of cloth flutters and it becomes a sign and a code and a message and all that you want it to be. Then it vanishes and you are outside the dark tower again.

...look up and see the madness organized in the stars.

Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being in love, which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Those that truly love have roots that grow towards each other underground, and, when all the pretty blossoms have fallen from their branches, they find that they are one tree and not two.

Living with someone who hates you is—it drives you mad—

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

Love is a mental madness.

Love is one of society's many socially accepted forms of madness.

Love releases us into the realm of divine imagination, where the soul is expanded and reminded of its unearthly cravings and needs. We think that when a lover inflates his loved one he is failing to acknowledge her flaws - "Love is blind." But it may be the other way around. Love allows a person to see the true angelic nature of another person, the halo, the aureole of divinity. Certainly from the perspective of ordinary life this is madness and illusion. But if we let loose our hold on our philosophies and psychologies of enlightenment and reason, we might learn to appreciate the perspective of eternity that enters life as madness, Plato's divine frenzy.

Mad is a label we attach to people we find disruptive and confusing.

Love weakens rationality and leaves everyone only one step beyond the mental disorder. Love and madness, therefore, are almost the same phenomenon.

Loving without losing yourself is madness. Loving to lose yourself is merit.

Madness is blackness.

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.

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

Madness is like being primitive once again and going back to the ancient era when there was no language, no clothes to wear, no ready-made food to eat, no cozy shelter to take rest in and no future to plan about. Only the ‘present’ was present with a struggle to survive. But, the only difference between a ‘primitive man’ and a ‘mad man’ is that the former had a ‘reasonable’ mind with some unreasonable traits and the latter has an ‘unreasonable’ mind with many unreasonable and possibly some reasonable traits!

Madness is too glamorous a term to convey what happens to most people who are losing their minds. That word is too exciting,too literary, too interesting in its connotations, to convey the boredom, the slowness, the dreariness, the dampness of depression.

Madness, genius, originality - it's all the same thing; it's a breaking of our normal value structure and the substitution of another one.

Madness is a matter of perspective, little dreamer.

Madness is depressing illusion.

Madness is like gravity, you just need to push it...

…madness is not hysteria. It can be very quiet…

Madness is witlessness’s.

Magda looks at me as if I've gone mad. Or I've grown up. It's kind of the same thing.

Madness does not always howl. Sometimes, it is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, "Hey, is there room in your head for one more?

Madness exist in the mind.

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

Madness is a wholly human malady borne in a brain too evolved—or not quite evolved enough—to bear the awful burden of its own existence.