Madness Quotes - Page 23

• So much love, too much love, it is our madness, it is rotting us out, exploding us like dandelion polls.

  John Updike

  Rotting, Too Much, Dandelions

  John Updike (2010). “Rabbit Redux”, p.120, Random House

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• Let us be separated by wars and pestilence, death, madness but not by the passing of time.

  Mario Puzo

  War, Pestilence, Passing

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• Sometimes I feel sure he is as mad as a hatter and then, just as he is at his maddest, I find there is a method in his madness.

  Agatha Christie

  Mad, Sometimes, Method

  Agatha Christie (2015). “The Mysterious Affair at Styles: Christie's Collections”, p.137, 谷月社

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• I don't kill people. Perhaps it's just another inhibition to do away with it. Perhaps not. There's really no way of telling. It's possible I've just never been able to well up enough interest in any person to care long enough to end their life. I'd much rather avoid them altogether. Most of them. It's 4 A.M. and the sky is beautiful up and away from this room and this bed and the oppressive inevitability of sleep. I HATE SLEEP. But sleep always comes (that, or madness).

  Jhonen Vasquez

  Beautiful, Hate, Sleep

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• Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form.

  Herman Melville

  Thinking, May, Form

  Herman Melville (2008). “Moby-Dick”, p.204, Velvet Element Books

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• And she arose from her deathbed in a gossamer gown, with eyes the color of starlight and hair as black as the night. And those who were her captors trembled, for the scent of death and madness emanated from her soul, and yet she was not dead. She moved like the spiders that creep in the treetops, and none could look away. Taking her first captor in hand, she fed deep and ravenous. And so it was that Myst, Queen of the Indigo Court, was born from the blood of the dead.

  Yasmine Galenorn

  Queens, Eye, Night

  Yasmine Galenorn (2010). “Night Myst”, p.13, Penguin

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• I am mad - but I choose this madness.

  Gloria E. Anzaldúa

  Mad

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• The only performance that makes it, that really makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness.

  Mick Jagger

  Way, Achieve, Performances

  "Fictional character: Turner". "Performance", www.imdb.com. 1970.

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• Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn't enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I've never been able to kill myself.

  Louis-Ferdinand Celine

  Lying, Men, Agony

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• Great minds that are healthy are never considered geniuses, while this sublime qualification is lavished on brains that are often inferior but are slightly touched by madness.

  Guy de Maupassant

  Healthy, Sublime, Brain

  Guy de Maupassant (2015). “Collected Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant: The Necklace + The Piece of String + Boule de Suif + Mademoiselle Fifi + Pierrot + Two Friends + La Maison Tellier + Ghosts and much more: From one of the greatest French writers, widely regarded as the ‘Father of Short Story’ writing, who had influenced W. Somerset Maugham, O. Henry, Anton Chekhov and Henry James”, p.1050, e-artnow

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• That in you which recognizes madness as madness (even if it is your own) is sanity, is the arising awareness, is the end of insanity.

  Eckhart Tolle

  Spiritual, Insanity, Awareness

  Eckhart Tolle (2006). “A New Earth (Oprah #61): Awakening to Your Life's Purpose”, p.100, Penguin

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• And I think that you do not understand that sometimes the only choice is between acceptance and madness.

  Cassandra Clare

  Acceptance, Thinking, Choices

  Cassandra Clare (2013). “The Infernal Devices: Clockwork Angel; Clockwork Prince; Clockwork Princess”, p.339, Simon and Schuster

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• Within the universe of the extraordinary, those qualities we designate to human concepts of gender are often shared, exchanged, or even completely obliterated. Because of this mixture of traits, these twins called Genius and Madness often appear to be the same thing. They both have a tendency to blur the lines of what we call norms, or established reality. They both, when we study that grand tapestry known as history and modern-day society, tend to stand out in much bolder relief than other figures. -- from Dancing with Madness, Dancing with Genius

  Aberjhani

  Reality, Dancing, Quality

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• Demons feed on death and pain madness," Valentine said. "When I kill, it is because I must. You grew up in a falsely beautiful paradise surrounded by fragile glass walls, my daughter. Your mother created the world she wanted to live in and she brought you up in it, but she never told you it was an illusion. And all the time the demons waited with their weapons of blood and terror to smash the glass and pull you free of the lie.

  Cassandra Clare

  Beautiful, Daughter, Mother

  Cassandra Clare (2012). “Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instruments Series (5 books): City of Bones; City of Ashes; City of Glass; City of Fallen Angels, City of Lost Souls”, p.830, Simon and Schuster

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• I smiled back, the importance of manners, my mother always said, is inversely related to how inclined one is to use them, or, in other words, sometimes politeness is all that stands between oneself and madness.

  Nicole Krauss

  Mother, Use, Sometimes

  Nicole Krauss (2011). “Great House: A Novel”, p.257, W. W. Norton & Company

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• I have studiously tried to avoid ever using the word 'madness' to describe my condition. Now and again, the word slips out, but I hate it. '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.

  Elizabeth Wurtzel

  Depression, Hate, People

  Elizabeth Wurtzel (2014). “Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America”, p.270, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I add my oath of protection to the bone,' he said in a whisper. 'To you now and to any child you may bear in the future. I would trade no day I spend with you for a life of safe slavery. I accepted the post of Seeker of my own free will. And if Darken Rahl takes the whole world into madness, then we will die with a sword in our hands, not chains on our wings. We will not allow it to be easy for them to kill us; they will pay a high price. We will fight with our last breath if need be, and in our death, let us inflict a wound on him that will fester until it claims him.

  Terry Goodkind

  Children, Fighting, Hands

  Terry Goodkind (2015). “Wizard's First Rule”, p.185, Head of Zeus

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• Madness alone is truly terrifying, inasmuch as you cannot placate it by threats, persuasion, or bribes.

  Joseph Conrad

  Persuasion, Threat, Bribe

  Joseph Conrad, Bruce Harkness, S. W. Reid (1990). “The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale”, p.31, Cambridge University Press

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• I am interested in madness. I believe it is the biggest thing in the human race, and the most constant. How do you take away from a man his madness without also taking away his identity? Are we sure it is desirable for a man's spirit not to be at war with itself, or that it is better to be serene and ready to go to dinner than to be excited and unwilling to stop for a cup of coffee, even?

  William Saroyan

  War, Coffee, Believe

  "Short Drive, Sweet Chariot". Book by William Saroyan, 1966.

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• Madness is not what it seems. Time stops. All my life I've been obsessed with time, its motion and velocity, the way it works you over, the way it rushes you onward, a pebble turning in a brook. I've always been obsessed with where I'd go, and what I'd do, and how I would live. I've always harbored a desperate hope that I would make something of myself. Not then. Time stopped seeming so much like the thing that would transform me into something worthwhile and began to be inseparable from death. I spent my time merely waiting.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Waiting, Pebbles, Velocity

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• You used to say. "Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness." Madness doubled is marriage I added when the caustic was cool, not intending to produce a golden rule.

  Anne Carson

  Desire, And Love, Golden

  Anne Carson (2009). “The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos”, p.35, Vintage

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• Zaphod felt he was teetering on the edge of madness and wondered if he shouldn't just jump over and have done with it.

  Douglas Adams

  Done, Felt, Ifs

  Douglas Adams (2009). “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe”, p.20, Pan Macmillan

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• Without madness what is man But a wholesome beast, Postponed corpse that begets?

  Fernando Pessoa

  Men, Beast, Corpses

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• Be careful how you suggest things to me. For there is in me a madness which goes beyond martyrdom, the madness of an utterly idle man.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Be Careful, Idle

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• Will his work survive? Alas, I worry that it will not. As an American liberal with impeccable credentials, I would like to say that political correctness is going to kill American liberalism if it is not fought to the death by people like me for the dangers it represents to free speech, to the exchange of ideas, to openheartedness, or to the spirit of art itself. Political correctness has a stranglehold on academia, on feminism, and on the media. It is a form of both madness and maggotry, and has already silenced the voices of writers like James Dicky across the land.

  Pat Conroy

  Art, Media, Land

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