#insanity

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

#innocence #insanity #beauty

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

— Denis Diderot

#insanity #men

The more sensitive the lunatic, the less able is he to resist this prying interest of the normal human being. I felt that Renée's change of key - to myself, I compared Renée to a sweet melody, a little flat despite its laborious harmonies - was approaching. ↗

— Colette

#insanity #sensitivity #sidonie-gabrielle-colette #change

Am I cured?” “No. You’re someone who is different, but who wants to be the same as everyone else. And that, in my view, is a serious illness.” “Is wanting to be different a serious illness?” “It is if you force yourself to be the same as everyone else. It causes neuroses, psychoses, and paranoia. It’s a distortion of nature, it goes against God’s laws, for in all the world’s woods and forests, he did not create a single leaf the same as another. But you think it’s insane to be different, and that’s why you chose to live in Villete, because everyone is different here, and so you appear to be the same as everyone else. Do you understand?” Mari nodded. “People go against nature because they lack the courage to be different, and then the organism starts to produce Vitriol, or bitterness, as this poison is more commonly known. ↗

— Paulo Coelho

#insanity #mental-illness #courage

Embrace your inner lunatic. Fun times guaranteed. ↗

— Derek Landy

#humor #humorous #insanity #lunatics #death

If he had to spend the evening with madwomen, he would prefer at least one of them be willing to let him grope her. ↗

— Thomm Quackenbush

#insane #insanity #dreams

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

#fear #horror #insanity #loneliness #madness

To experience real agony is something hard to write about, impossible to understand while it grips you; you're frightened out of your wits, can’t sit still, move, or even go decently insane. ↗

— Charles Bukowski

#insanity #experience

The difference between faith and insanity is that faith is the ability to hold firmly to a conclusion that is incompatible with the evidence, whereas insanity is the ability to hold firmly to a conclusion that is incompatible with the evidence. ↗

— William Harwood

#evidence #faith #insanity #mythology #faith

She stopped shrieking after a moment. It wasn't the crazy looks she drew from the other pedestrians that made her stop. And her damaged sanity hadn't managed to repair itself. She'd left something behind in that apartment. Something she'd always taken for granted. Faith in a rational world. It was like a tiny cog had been removed from her brain, and all the gears were still working, but a slight wobble was slowly and inevitably stripping the teeth until one day, without warning the Rube Goldberg device that was her mind would fall apart with a loud SPROING. ↗

— A. Lee Martinez

#faith