#insanity

Perhaps it was only that I did not feel any crazier than I had ever felt. I did not notice any missing gray tissue, I did not seem to be thinking any slower or more strangely, and so far I’d had no conversations with invisible buddies that I was aware of. Except in my sleep, of course-and did that really count? Weren’t we all crazy in our sleep? What was sleep, after all, but the process by which we dumped our insanity into a dark subconscious pit and came out on the other side ready to eat cereal instead of the neighbor’s children? ↗

— Jeff Lindsay

#insanity #madness #mind #psyche #sleep

I wonder how long it would take him to realize I'm right as sin - it's the rest of the world that's wrong. I'm not even sure how I qualify for admission to Aspen Springs. Does wanting to die equal losing your mind? ↗

— Ellen Hopkins

#suicide #equality

To be sane, he held, was either to be sedated by melancholy or activated by hysteria, two responses which were 'always and equally warranted for those of sound insight'. All others were irrational, merely symptoms of imaginations left idle, of memories out of work. And above these mundane responses, the only elevation allowable, the only valid transcendence, was a sardonic one: a bliss that annihilated the universe with jeers of dark joy, a mindful ecstasy. Anything else in the way of 'mysticism' was a sign of deviation or distraction, and a heresy to the obvious. (“The Medusa”) ↗

— Thomas Ligotti

#insanity #melancholy #mysticism #sanity #sardonic

... insanity is never reasonable. ↗

— E.A. Bucchianeri

#insane #insane-world #insanity #it-s-a-mad-world #life-experience

Delusions are hardly an escape from reality. It’s a way of understanding insane people living in a backwards world. ↗

— Shannon L. Alder

#escape #family #friendships #insanity #love

Solitude is indeed dangerous for a working intelligence. We need to have around us people who think and speak. When we are alone for a long time we people the void with phantoms ↗

— Guy de Maupassant

#loneliness #solitude #intelligence

Being able to embrace contradictions is a sign of intelligence. Or insanity. ↗

— Richard Kadrey

#insanity #intelligence #intelligence

and then I decided I was a lemon for a couple of weeks. ↗

— Douglas Adams

#ford #insanity #lemons #life

Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them. ↗

— George Eliot

#sanity #life

I watched the black ocean in his eyes and saw this flash behind them and understood what he had meant the night before, about the insanity that had gripped him. He was not so far gone as to be lost, but he was close, and I knew it had come from me turning my back on him as I had started to flee. Whether I wanted to or not, I anchored him to this world, and I was the only thing he'd known, maybe for his whole life. He had watched me, yes, he had stalked me, oh yes, but it had driven him to the edge. I inhaled sharply at the wildness I saw in him, the despair that was threatening to rise. ↗

— T.J. Klune

#insanity #life