c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
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.
— Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life
So what causes men to become violent? I’ll tell you, boredom, silly rules, muggy screws and pathetic governors. What else can we do - swallow it, wipe our mouths out. You have to fight for your rights. Not sit back and take it.
— Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life
Violence leads to madness, it fills you with crazy thoughts. You sleep it, eat it and shit it. You become a time bomb. They push you a bit more – you blow up. They beat you and you survive. You get strong and you blow again. So how long can a man live this way? I’ll tell you…until he dies, if need be. It becomes a way of life, but I don’t remember it, why? Simple…it’s painful; it’s empty and alone. Your cell becomes a hole in the earth, it sucks you in. You drown in your own bitterness, it’s not right to live this way.
— Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life
Prison madness is much the same! Insanity is plentiful in prisons. These days with the drug culture it’s not a lot of difference, as a lot of convicts make themselves psychotic and paranoid. Many end up killers, all over petty and minor problems. Where men would once squabble, fight and kill over a ½ oz of bacca they now do the same over a gram of white powder or a bag of brown!
— Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life
Urges like the loony who enjoys strangling, it’s his buzz. He gets depressed when in seclusion, as he can’t strangle anybody so in the end he hangs himself in turmoil. Their brain can’t handle it. He wants so bad to kill, but they will not let him, so he has to kill himself.
— Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life
One lunatic in Rampton used to have bouts of hysteria. Where he would let out a scream, and run at a wall and dive headfirst…crash! He was given a crash helmet! (Well it is a mad house.)
— Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life
There is no end. There is no cure. It gets worse with time. Cure. How can you cure an institution, we are bricks crumbling in the walls of despair. Death is inevitable for us all. But the insanity is here to stay.
— Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life
The asylum years taught me a lot about myself. Bear in mind I’m the only lunatic in the United Kingdom who spent time in all three max secure asylums, which you should now know are…Rampton, Broadmoor and Ashworth. Don’t ask me which is the best or the worst, as how do you compare insanity with insanity?
— Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life
Broadmoor creeps into your blood, the walls touch the sky and the grounds suck you in, they’ve even got their own burial ground. We called it the ‘madman’s hole’, it smelt of fear; a stillness and even the birds seemed to have a stone face like their eyes were made of marble. So many monsters, men of hell, I don’t know how a sane man can keep sane in there.
— Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life
Asylums are crazy places, with crazy rules. If you’re not mad when you arrive, you are when you leave. (That’s if you ever leave.) I was lucky…I got slung out; they couldn’t afford to keep me any longer.
— Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life
A loon thought he was Frank Sinatra and every time Frank came on TV or radio the loon would go mad, impostor!
— Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life
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.
— Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life
He got a lovely pair of trainers given off his mum for Christmas, best pair he ever had, but it was the nylon laces that he couldn’t take his eyes off. They found him hanging in his cell!
— Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life
She sat in a secluded room, she was mad, but she could not accept it; so she was neither sane nor insane. She could not be either until she knew herself, so in limbo she must die. She kept stuffing toilet roll into her mouth. They found her choked to death!
— Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life
He was a silent type, very nervy of people: shy, introverted, nobody would believe he could scream so loud…well he did drink a bottle of bleach!
— Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life
I am a creation of the establishment, I realise I’m not as strong as life itself, but I also realise death will suck me in. The eyes and fingers are pointing in my direction. For me, there is only one way – one road, one signpost; it reads, ‘Hell’. It’s a one-way ticket; there are no brakes on my vehicle, there is no way out, only one way in.
— Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life
Sometimes I stare into a pool of piss, I see my reflection, I picture a hole in my face, there’s nothing there, it’s vanished. I watch the maggots turn to flies, and they fly off with bits of flesh from my body. I attempt to wipe it clear from my mind, but the nice thoughts get swallowed up. I can’t think nice for too long…it would destroy me.
— Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life
Unlike most I don’t fear prison, never have, never will. Obviously I don’t want it, I hate it, but it’s the hate that drives me on to survive.
— Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life
Some of the madmen are really fun to be with. I soon learnt to relate to them. I soon became one of them. I ended up the maddest of the mad. There is no madder than myself! Please believe it.
— Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life
A madman overcomes it by adapting to his surroundings. You can’t give up. Why die? There is always another mission
—  it’s the missions that keep you alive.
Take outside - freedom. What is it? What does it mean to a madman? I’ll tell you, we go years through a lifetime with no love, no sex, no nice food and no nice clothes. So when it comes…we choke on it! The kindness strangles us; we can’t cope, so we make pigs of ourselves.
— Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life
Madness is a bowl of poison cherries, chew them and die, but you die screaming in agony.
— Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life
A doctor once asked me: 'Charlie, what do you think your problem is?' “Doc,' I said, '…you’re the problem!
— Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life
You get used to the brain being squeezed. At nighttime in the darkness of your emptiness, it seems to swell back up and gives you some peace. In the darkness even the pain is not so bad. A bruise heals. (Time is the treatment.) But it’s your mind that’s tortured. Your thoughts are in turmoil and despair. Feelings of awesome revenge and destruction manifest themselves.
— Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life
I personally could never come to terms with my label of ‘Criminally Insane’. Just because of my violent outbursts in prison, don’t mean to say I’m mad. Obviously I had become a disruptive element within the penal system. Uncontrollable! Unpredictable! But that don’t make insanity!
— Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life
You’ve been inexpressibly lucky,” he said finally. “And inexpressibly mad, although in your case the two seem to be the same thing
— Naomi Novik, Uprooted
There is no law that gods must be fair, Achilles,” Chiron said. “And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone. Do you think?”“Perhaps,” Achilles admitted.I listened and did not speak. Achilles’ eyes were bright in the firelight, his face drawn sharply by the flickering shadows. I would know it in dark or disguise, I told myself. I would know it even in madness.
— Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles
Oh the madness of battle! We fear it, we celebrate it, the poets sing of it, and when it fills the blood like fire it is a real madness. It is joy! All the terror is swept away, a man feels he could live for ever, he sees the enemy retreating, knows he himself is invincible, that even the gods would shrink from his blade and his bloodied shield. And I was still keening that mad song, the battle song of slaughter, the sound that blotted out the screams of dying men and the crying of the wounded. It is fear, of course, that feeds the battle madness, the release of fear into savagery. You win in the shield wall by being more savage than your enemy, by turning his savagery back into fear.
— Bernard Cornwell, Warriors of the Storm
When I say the things that don't make sense you answer me anyway. It's like having green in your shirt.
— Mindy McGinnis, A Madness So Discreet
We are all just illusions of what we want the world to believe about us, no one even begins to assume what lurks below my surface, not even my best friends. ~Callum~
— A.Giannoccaro
There is something maddening about mediocrity that calls forth the worst in those who are forced to deal with it.
— Moss Hart, Act One
Never had a decent report in his life!" Tony repeated, hardly able to believe the words. He was thinking, in shocked surprise, that even Tante Bettina did not know how mad the English could be.
— Constance Savery, Enemy Brothers
Just imagine, you’re on a stretcher in the hospital, being wheeled to the operating theatre, they inject you, put you to sleep…anaesthetic. You drift into blackness, you’re out and you’re the closest yet to death.  Then a surgeon cuts into your body, rips you open, goes deep inside. Looks within, pulls a bit out, puts bits in, sews you up. Then! If you’re lucky, you awake! Some don’t wake, this is my point, will you wake? Why should you? How can you? That’s the black hole of madness you’re in! Screaming to get out: ‘Alive’ or just ‘Sane’! You want out of it, you want to see the light!
— Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life
You can grow up being a troublemaker and then before you know it the next thing you’re doing is listening to Frank Zappa whilst chilling out…now that’s the intelligent way out. What would a psychiatrist say about that?
— Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life
Just take my advice and stay away from those psychiatrists they’re dangerous. And if you’re 13 years old and sitting in front of one do what I never…chin him ‘cos if you don’t you’ll live to regret it. You talk to your mum and dad (they know you best) and keep your problems in the family.
— Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life
Is Bronson mad! Let me ask you! How else can I be? I’m probably the maddest guy on two legs if the truth was known, but prison will never beat me, I’d sooner die today than allow it too!
— Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life
Ever see moors murderer Ian Brady, study his photos, study Black, study Cannon, study Sutcliffe - study them all! Who says evil is not recognisable?
— Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life
Insanity can be a heavy cross to bear; I mean look at all those people in loony bins compared to those that are free and walking the streets – a tiny percentage are classed as mad. The incidence of mental problems amongst people is said to be rising, so what do they go and do, they cut the amount of asylums by half! Whoever makes these decisions has to be a loon and a half!
— Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life
There are different categories of madmen, and different types of asylums! I know absolutely nothing about the asylums that house the madman who thinks he is a space man. Would you believe that 90% of madmen are treated in outside clinics?
— Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life
Ask anybody, would you want an ex-madman living next door? It’s difficult enough being an ex-convict. It’s double hard for us ‘madmen’. Please believe it.
— Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life
They ask themselves: “What will he do?” “How will he react?” “Will he go mad?” “Will he bite?” “Will he be armed?” They’re pumped up with fear. Adrenaline pumping, fingers tense on the trigger, brains racing. And I’m cool as a cat! The name ‘Charles Bronson’ causes panic! The name ‘Mickey Peterson’ causes stress! The police all love to arrest me, as I’m the most exciting madman they will ever arrest! It’s a fact. So here I am years later, and I’m still the madman. There is no escaping my past.
— Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life
Looking back at the years I spent in the asylums, I’m now convinced some of that insanity rubbed off onto me!
— Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life
Mad people are very emotionally orientated! They have complex feelings, they’re easily upset, but are also easy to please! Most mad people have lonely lives, as nobody understands them. So they become “Lost Souls.” They dream a lot. Go within their minds to search - some will turn strange, become dangerous. So a madman is created! His world becomes a mission.
— Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life
It occurred to me then that the man might not be mad
—  I found this far more disquieting than the alternative.
There's a pleasure being mad that only the madman knows.
— Elly Griffiths, The House at Sea's End
Amid the pointing and the horror the clean flame.
— William Faulkner
To stay sane in a mad world is the real victory.
— Marty Rubin
Amid the pointing and the horror, the clean flame.
— William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
Crushes are more beautiful than affairs because there is no responsibility, no worry, no commitment. Just look at your crush and smile like an idiot.
— Srinivas Shenoy
In the gray world above, I hear myself howling with laughter. Far below me, in the psychic abyss that is part of the Darkness, I hear another howling, one full of joy and pain, rage and celebration.Not just another witch is coming, my foolish Sisters, but Witch.
— Anne Bishop, Daughter of the Blood
To remain sane in a mad world is the true victory.
— Marty Rubin
(On the communist regime of Ceaușescu)"Romania," said Eugene, "was twenty million people living inside the imagination of a madman.
— Jon Ronson
What might happen if we could somehow reorient ourselves toward our more loving, bonobo side rather than our inner mad chimpanzee?
— Susan Block, The Bonobo Way
In how many minds should I go crazy? Whom should I ask?
— Suman Pokhrel
If you haven’t lost your mind yet, that’s because you haven’t seen very much.
— Yasmina Khadra, The Sirens of Baghdad
Love is a madman,working his wild schemes, tearing off his clothes,running through the mountains, drinking poison,and now quietly choosing annihilation.
— Jalaluddin Rumi, The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing
Only a mind that is deeply stirred can utter something noble and beyond the power of others.
— Seneca, On the Shortness of Life
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.
— Donna Tartt
Relationships are nine parts intuition, one part madness.
— Chloe Thurlow, Katie in Love
Tomorrow at seven o'clock a strange phenomenon will occur: the earth is going to sit on the moon. This has also been written about by the noted English chemist Wellington. I confess, I felt troubled at heart when I pictured to myself the extraordinary delicacy and fragility of the moon. For the moon is usually made in Hamburg, and made quite poorly. I'm surprised England doesn't pay attention to this. It's made by a lame cooper, and one can see that the fool understands nothing about the moon. He used tarred rope and a quantity of cheap olive oil, and that's why there's a terrible stench all over the earth, so that you have to hold your nose. And that's why the moon itself is such a delicate sphere that people can't live on it, and now only noses live there. And for the same reason, we can't see our own noses, for they're all in the moon.
— Nikolai Gogol, The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol
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.
— Rick Yancey, The Final Descent
The origin of illness may be in the past, but the virulent crisis must be dynamically tackled. I believe in attacking the core of the illness, through its present symptoms, quickly, directly. The past is a labyrinth. One does not have to step into it and move step by step through every turn and twist. The past reveals itself instantly, in today’s fever or abscess of the soul.
— Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934
All habits are bad habits. (...) Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
— G.K. Chesterton, Manalive
Christ--the quickest way to send a bloke mad is to let him go on re-fighting his war till he gets it right.
— M.L. Stedman, The Light Between Oceans
I don't think I could ever see her closely," the sentinel replied, "however close she came." His own voice was hushed and regretful, echoing with lost chances. "She has a newness," he said. "Everything is for the first time. See how she moves, how she walks, how she turns her head -- all for the first time, the first time anyone has ever done these things. See how she draws her breath and lets it go again, as though no one else in the world knew that air was good. It is all for her. If I learned that she had been born this very morning, I would only be surprised that she was so old." The second sentinel stared down from his tower at the three wanderers. The tall man saw him first, and next the dour woman. Their eyes reflected nothing but his armor, grim and cankered and empty. But then the girl in the ruined black cloak raised her head, and he stepped back from the parapet, putting out one tin glove against her glance. In a moment she passed into the shadow of the castle with her companions, and he lowered his hand. "She may be mad," he said calmly. "No grown girl looks like that unless she is mad. That would be annoying, but far preferable to the remaining possibility." "Which is?" the younger man prompted after a silence."Which is that she was indeed born this morning. I would rather that she were mad.
— Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn
I finally realized that I had to embrace the madness, let it transform me instead of letting it define me....."You, my ferocious girl, are embracing the madness. Lean into it, won't ya?
— R.L. Haas, Portals of Water and Wine
Christ," he said to the tiny reflection of himself that floated along the surface of his coffee,"You have become quite the maudlin sop, haven't you? Laughing softly, he rubbed a hand over his face. Step one on the road back to sanity, stop talking to yourself.
— Kristen Callihan, Winterblaze
Madness is a matter of perspective, little dreamer.
— Samantha Shannon, The Mime Order
If I can only see him in madness, is it worth trying to hold onto sanity?
— Beth Revis, The Body Electric
Theo's already on his way. Paul might bee too, but communications have been down so long, I don't know.""Heading out here with a storm like this coming in? That's madness." Dad sighs. "Then again, jumping through dimensions to chase a dead man is madness too. I had long suspected their lunacy but this confirmation is nonetheless disquieting.""See? Everything's going to be fine.
— Claudia Gray, A Thousand Pieces of You
Going mad is the beginning of a process. It is not supposed to be the end result.
— Jeanette Winterson
They think thee mad? I'll show thou mad, my lord.
— Phar West Nagle
He shook hands. With greening faces, with eyes full of sparks, his two friends leaned upon their canes. One had on a crushed bowler (why?)... Both were weary. Both knew that what was approaching was the end. Both had spent the day in their offices and when they interrupted their work with an indiscreet nod, when they turned the conversation toward that end, both broke in "Lord, we have strayed from our business." And ever deeper sunk their eyes, a deathly shadow was descending. The words of his friends had been bought with blood, but they were stolen. Someone, listening, recorded them on a phonograph and thousands of cylinders began to twang. A new enterprise opened, on sale a bronze throat, a screaming cavity; an experienced mechanic installed the throat phonograph. The purchased throat squealed day and night and his friends grew exhausted and one day he said to them both "Lord, I am going." He grinned. And they grinned: they understood everything. Now they stood on the platform, stood with him and saw him off. Someone long and dark with the face of an ox, shoulders crooked as a sorrowful cemetery cross and wrapped up in a frock-coat, swept into the coach. And then the bell rang, and then they waved their bowlers; three wooden arms swung in the air.("Adam")
— Andrei Bely, The Silver Age of Russian Culture: An Anthology
We are all subjected to two distinct natures in the same person. I myself have suffered grievously in that way.
— James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
The bast, dispersing in shreds in the sunset whispered "Time has begun." The son, Adam, stripped naked, descended into the Old Testament of his native land and arrayed himself in bast; a wreath of roadside field grass he placed upon his brow, a staff, not a switch, he pulled from the ground, flourishing the birch branch like a sacred palm. On the road he stood like a guard. The dust-gray road ran into the sunset. And a crow perched there, perched and croaked, there where the celestial fire consumed the earth.There were blind men along the dust-gray road running into the twilight. Antique, crooken, they trailed along, lonely and sinister silhouettes, holding to one another and to their leader's cane. They were raising dust. One was beard-less, he kept squinting. Another, a little old man with a protruding lip, was whispering and praying. A third, covered with red hair, frowned. Their backs were bent, their heads bowed low, their arms extended to the staff. Strange it was to see this mute procession in the terrible twilight. They made their way immutable, primordial, blind. Oh, if only they could open their eyes, oh if only they were not blind! Russian Land, awake!And Adam, rude image of the returned king, lowered the birch branch to their white pupils. And on them he laid his hands, as, groaning and moaning they seated themselves in the dust and with trembling hands pushed chunks of black bread into their mouths. Their faces were ashen and menacing, lit with the pale light of deadly clouds. Lightning blazed, their blinded faces blazed. Oh, if only they opened their eyes, oh, if only they saw the light!Adam, Adam, you stand illumined by lightnings. Now you lay the gentle branch upon their faces. Adam, Adam, say, see, see! And he restores their sight.But the blind men turning their ashen faces and opening their white eyes did not see. And the wind whispered "Thou art behind the hill." From the clouds a fiery veil began to shimmer and died out. A little birch murmured, beseeching, and fell asleep. The dusk dispersed at the horizon and a bloody stump of the sunset stuck up. And spotted with brilliant coals glowing red, the bast streamed out from the sunset like a striped cloak. On the waxen image of Adam the field grass wreaths sighed fearfully giving a soft whistle and the green dewy clusters sprinkled forth fiery tears on the blind faces of the blind. He knew what he was doing, he was restoring their sight.("Adam")
— Andrei Bely, The Silver Age of Russian Culture: An Anthology
There was a single window that tapered into a funnel, with eerie moonlight passing through it, reflecting directly off the globe like a mirror. For a moment, as I rose I saw something glimmering within. Dumbly, with feverish whispers assailing me, I realized it was the center of one of the distant galaxies, flaring after some unknown cataclysm. Its radiance was such that it burst from its prison. It met the moonlight halfway. It created kaleidoscopic colours on the walls. Then, in answer, the reliefs transformed from majestic art into something approaching divine, alive, plays from Egyptian memory, given the spark of life from space. I saw animal-headed gods move. They stepped from the walls to take their place around the altar. All stared at the globe. Each raised their arms in silent supplication. And such was their toxic ecstasy that I wished to join them, to forget my dreadful experiences and revel in something truly wondrous.
— Tim Reed, Spider from the Well
But optimism dribbles away when horror repeats.
— Tim Reed, Spider from the Well
How bizarre, i think to myself, to be on a train and to actually not want to arrive anywhere? What kind of madness is that?
— Jackie Kay, Wish I Was Here
...I would be the last person to say that madness is not a solution.
— James Thurber
The winter drove them mad. It drove every man mad who had ever lived through it; there was only ever the question of degree. The sun disappeared, and you could not leave the tunnels, and everything and everyone you loved was ten thousand miles away. At best, a man suffered from strange lapses in judgment and perception, finding himself at the mirror about to comb his hair with a mechanical pencil, stepping into his undershirt, boiling up a pot of concentrated orange juice for tea. Most men felt a sudden blaze of recovery in their hearts at the first glimpse of a pale hem of sunlight on the horizon in mid-September. But there were stories, apocryphal, perhaps, but far from dubious, of men in past expeditions who sank so deeply into the drift of their own melancholy that they were lost forever. And few among the wives and families of the men who returned from a winter on the Ice would have said what they got back was identical to what they had sent down there.
— Michael Chabon
Here is what happens in middle age: Some friends and acquaintances who were merely eccentric for years become unmistakably mad.
— Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation
The difference between a drunkard and a madman is 10%.
— Auliq Ice
It's good to be mad for someone, but that's great if you are made for same one.
— Navnath Godse
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")
— Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal, The Silver Age of Russian Culture: An Anthology
Dear child, some stories have no morals. Sometimes darkness and madness are simply that.
— G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen
Some say that you should turn your face from the light of the moon. They say it makes you mad.I turn my face towards it and I laugh.Make me mad, I whisper. Go on, make Mina mad.I laugh again.Some people think that she's already mad, I think.
— David Almond, My Name Is Mina
...and I realized no matter what you do it’s bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad.
— Jack Kerouac, On the Road
I am mad, and I embrace it.
— A.G. Howard
I had lost confidence and a sense of self. Who am I? Am I a person who cowers in fear at the back of a spin class, avoiding everyone’s gaze? This uncertainty about who I am, this confusion over where I truly was in the time line of my illness and recovery, was ultimately the deeper source of the shame. A part of my soul believed that I would never be myself, the carefree, confident Susannah, again.
— Susannah Cahalan, Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness
Do you think that too," she said, "that I have slept too long in the moonlight?
— Jean Rhys
Madness, Brother Masseo, is the salt which prevents good sense from rotting.
— Nikos Kazantzakis, Saint Francis
How stand I, then,That have a father killed, a mother stained,Excitements of my reason and my blood,And let all sleep, while to my shame I seeThe imminent death of twenty thousand menThat for a fantasy and trick of fameGo to their graves like beds, fight for a plotWhereon the numbers cannot try the cause,Which is not tomb enough and continentTo hide the slain? O, from this time forthMy thoughts be bloody or be nothing 
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Do you know, I began to see what marriage is for. It’s to keep people away from each other. Sometimes I think that two people who love each other can be saved from madness only by the things that come between them—children, duties, visits, bores, relations—the things that protect married people from each other. We’ve been too close together—that has been our sin. We’ve seen the nakedness of each other’s souls.
— Edith Wharton, Souls Belated
It's madness the sheep to talk peace with the wolf
— Thomas Fuller
I know how to emulate crazy.
— A.G. Howard
It is madness. But sometimes, madness is the only path forward.
— Anne Fortier, The Lost Sisterhood
If you could stretch a given minute, what would you find between its unstuck components? Probably some kind of astral madness. A bleak comprehension of the final size of things.
— Don DeLillo, Great Jones Street
The fine line between genius and madness is a punch line. Duck, you idiot!
— Brian Spellman
Forgetting himself for a moment, Francis brought his hand out from under his frock in order to bless the multitude. When the people saw his wound they bellowed madly. The women dashed forward with mantles outstretched to catch the drops; the men thrust in their hands and anointed their faces with blood. The villagers' expressions grew savage, and so did their souls. They longed to be able to tear the Saint limb from limb in order for each of them to claim a mouthful of his flesh, for they wanted to make him their own, to have him enter them so that they could become one with a saint—could be sanctified. Blind rage had overpowered them; their eyes were leaden, their lips ringed with froth.
— Nikos Kazantzakis, Saint Francis
Was it a form of madness, no longer to be able to trust your sense of things? To be betrayed by decisions apparently arrived at carefully and through reason, but really no more than marauding appetites cunningly tricked out as reasonable choices?
— Paul Russell, The Coming Storm
I wondered what sort of woman loved a man like that.
— Jon Ronson, The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry
There was a fine line between madness and intelligence.
— Kameron Hurley, Rapture
People like you don’t go mad, Vi. They’re quiet on the outside and loud on the inside and sane as the day is long
— April Genevieve Tucholke, Between the Spark and the Burn
The world is too sane. It could use a little madness.
— Cameron Jace, Insanity
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.
— Navessa Allen, Scandal
I'll love you with all the madness in my soul.
— Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run
I would rather go mad, gone down the dark road to Mexico, heroin dripping in my veins, eyes and ears full of marijuana, eating the god Peyote on the floor of a mudhut on the border or laying in a hotel room over the body of some suffering man or woman; rather jar my body down the road, crying by a diner in the Western sun; rather crawl on my naked belly over the tincans of Cincinnati; rather drag a rotten railroad tie to a Golgotha in the Rockies; rather, crowned with thorns in Galveston, nailed hand and foot in Los Angeles, raised up to die in Denver, pierced in the side in Chicago, perished and tombed in New Orleans and resurrected in 1958 somewhere on Garret Mountain, come down roaring in a blaze of hot cars and garbage, streetcorner Evangel in front of City I-Tall, surrounded by statues of agonized lions, with a mouthful of shit, and the hair rising on my scalp, screaming and dancing in praise of Eternity annihilating the sidewalk, annihilating reality, screaming and dancing against the orchestra in the destructible ballroom of the world, blood streaming from my belly and shoulders flooding the city with its hideous ecstasy, rolling over the pavements and highways by the bayoux and forests and derricks leaving my flesh and my bones hanging on the trees.
— Allen Ginsberg
Why does our world feel so very crazy? Why do mental and emotional illnesses emerge more rapidly than we can educate psychiatrists, psychologists, addiction specialists, and mental health counselors to diagnose and treat them? We are marinating in the soup of collective madness, cruelty, selfishness, and lies, the soup of spiritual toxicity.
— Albert J. LaChance, The Third Covenant: The Transmission of Consciousness in the Work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Berry, and Albert J. LaChance
I wonder why the wind, even the wind doth seemTo mock me now, all night, all night, andHave I strayed among the cliffs hereThey say, some day I'll fallDown through the sea-bit fissures, and no moreKnow the warm cloak of sun, or batheThe dew across my tired eyes to comfort them.They try to keep me hid within four walls.I will not stay!
— Ezra Pound, Personæ: The Shorter Poems
Madness, genius, originality - it's all the same thing; it's a breaking of our normal value structure and the substitution of another one.
— Malcolm Bradbury, Eating People is Wrong
He was clearly not the murderer whom Hawksmoor was seeking, but it was generally the innocent who confessed: in the course of many enquiries, Hawksmoor had come across those who accused themselves of crimes which they had not committed and who demanded to be taken away before they could do more harm. He was acquainted with such people and recognised them at once - although they were noticeable, perhaps, only for a slight twitch in the eye or the awkward gait with which they moved through the world. And they inhabited small rooms to which Hawksmoor would sometimes be called: rooms with a bed and a chair but nothing besides, rooms where they shut the door and began talking out loud, rooms where they sat all evening and waited for the night, rooms where they experienced blind panic and then rage as they stared at their lives. And sometimes when he saw such people Hawksmoor thought, this is what I will become, I will be like them because I deserve to be like them, and only the smallest accident separates me from them now.
— Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor
Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.
— Allan Dare Pearce, Hitler Burns Detroit
In a world that thought itself so wise yet behaved so stupidly, it was possible sometimes to believe that only the mad saw matters as they truly were, that only people like my brother were prepared to admit what they saw from the corner of their eye.
— Robert Goddard, Closed Circle
I prayed for death so as not to live in madness.
— Andrew Krivak, The Sojourn
Troublemakers will infect you with the malady of their madness.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
The day was ill-omened from the beginning; one of those unlucky days when every little detail seems to go wrong and one finds oneself engaged in a perpetual and infuriating strife with inanimate objects. How truly fiendish the sub-human world can be on these occasions! How every atom, every cell, every molecule, seems to be leagued in a maddening conspiracy against the unfortunate being who has incurred its obscure displeasure!
— Anna Kavan, Asylum Piece
My girl was mad and I loved her. Upon a night, she read my poetry; and kissing me madly she cried, ‘You are a genius, my love!’ To which I replied, ‘My girl,’ whispering, ‘Every doctor in this land with a prescription pad is more of a genius than I.
— Roman Payne
An intense life needs a touch of madness.
— Paulo Coelho, Veronika Decides to Die
All love stories are not same, perhaps a little madness makes it special.
— Tarif Naaz, Mayhem In Paradise
Going insane would be worse than dying. At least death is clear and final
— Rita Stradling, The Deception Dance
When all you have to face all life issues is the attitude forced on to you by society traditions, you will then regret not being the mad you used to be but will never be again.
— Sameh Elsayed
He was walking around in circles, the smell of the old furniture suddenly very distinct. There was a newspaper in his hand and he started reading it, paying particular attention to the headlines which seemed to be floating towards him so that now a band of black print encircled his forehead. He was curled upon the bed, hugging his knees, when the next horror came upon him: those who heard him last night would now have to report his theft, and his employer would call the police. He saw how the policeman took the telephone call at the station; how his name and address were spoken out loud; how he looked down at the floor as they led him away; how he was in the dock, forced to answer questions about himself, and now he was in a cell and had lost control of his own body. He was staring out of the window at the passing clouds when it occurred to him that he should write to his employer, explaining his drunkenness and confessing that he invented the story of theft; but who would believe him? It was always said that in drink there was truth, and perhaps it was true that he was a convicted thief. He began to sing,One fine day in the middle of the night,Two dead men got up to fightand then he knew what was meant by madness.
— Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor
You who understand what a human mind can be, how can you bear it? I don't have the hundredth part of your mind and there are days when I think I'll go mad. I can feel it. Or hear it. It's more like hearing something creeping along the walls, just behind my head, getting closer and closer. A big insect, maybe a scorpion. A dry skittering, that's what madness sounds like to me.
— Annabel Lyon, The Golden Mean
I’m a threat to anything that hurts Wonderland, including indifference.
— Cassandra Kemper, The Madder Woman
Despite an icy northeast wind huffing across the bay I sneak out after dark, after my mother falls asleep clutching her leather Bible, and I hike up the rutted road to the frosted meadow to stand in mist, my shoes in muck, and toss my echo against the moss-covered fieldstone corners of the burned-out church where Sunday nights in summer for years Father Thomas, that mad handsome priest, would gather us girls in the basement to dye the rose cotton linen cut-outs that the deacon’s daughter, a thin beauty with short white hair and long trim nails, would stitch by hand each folded edge then steam-iron flat so full of starch, stiffening fabric petals, which we silly Sunday school girls curled with quick sharp pulls of a scissor blade, forming clusters of curved petals the younger children assembled with Krazy glue and fuzzy green wire, sometimes adding tissue paper leaves, all of us gladly laboring like factory workers rather than have to color with crayon stubs the robe of Christ again, Christ with his empty hands inviting us to dine, Christ with a shepherd's staff signaling to another flock of puffy lambs, or naked Christ with a drooping head crowned with blackened thorns, and Lord how we laughed later when we went door to door in groups, visiting the old parishioners, the sick and bittersweet, all the near dead, and we dropped our bikes on the perfect lawns of dull neighbors, agnostics we suspected, hawking our handmade linen roses for a donation, bragging how each petal was hand-cut from a pattern drawn by Father Thomas himself, that mad handsome priest, who personally told the Monsignor to go fornicate himself, saying he was a disgruntled altar boy calling home from a phone booth outside a pub in North Dublin, while I sat half-dressed, sniffing incense, giddy and drunk with sacrament wine stains on my panties, whispering my oath of unholy love while wiggling uncomfortably on the mad priest's lap, but God he was beautiful with a fine chiseled chin and perfect teeth and a smile that would melt the Madonna, and God he was kind with a slow gentle touch, never harsh or too quick, and Christ how that crafty devil could draw, imitate a rose petal in perfect outline, his sharp pencil slanted just so, the tip barely touching so that he could sketch and drink, and cough without jerking, without ruining the work, or tearing the tissue paper, thin as a membrane, which like a clean skin arrived fresh each Saturday delivered by the dry cleaners, tucked into the crisp black vestment, wrapped around shirt cardboard, pinned to protect the high collar.
— Bob Thurber, Nothing But Trouble
You crave chaos. You're happiest when the world is in an uproar. You thrive on madness. Even when your magic is at its best when it's the catalyst to confusion. You still can't admit this?
— A.G. Howard, Splintered
And from the coffin of your madness there is no escape.
— Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus
The real madness probably is not another thing that the wisdom itself that, tired of discovering the shames of the world, has taken the intelligent resolution to become mad
— Heinrich Heine
Here I want to stress that perception of losing one’s mind is based on culturally derived and socially ingrained stereotypes as to the significance of symptoms such as hearing voices, losing temporal and spatial orientation, and sensing that one is being followed, and that many of the most spectacular and convincing of these symptoms in some instances psychiatrically signify merely a temporary emotional upset in a stressful situation, however terrifying to the person at the time. Similarly, the anxiety consequent upon this perception of oneself, and the strategies devised to reduce this anxiety, are not a product of abnormal psychology, but would be exhibited by any person socialized into our culture who came to conceive of himself as someone losing his mind.
— Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates
Every town has a psychopath or two. Not just the everyday crazy person, either. Not like Crazy Larry, the paint huffing weirdo peddling around town on a child-sized Huffy ranting about the end of the world, or the old lady dressed in rags who hands out filthy doll clothes to the kiddies. I'm talking about the cold, never remorseful lunatic, who may never have seemed insane up until the day he hacked apart his mother and shoved her stinking corpse into the attic. This town is overflowing with them; bloodcurdling murderers like Kenny Wayne Hilbert, Charlie Fender…Orland Winthro. And Al, the crazy had to come from somewhere.
Madness is a regenerating thing. Like a phoenix, when one strand dies, another burns anew.
— Chris Galford, At Faith's End
I studied him and realized that madness is the last defence of the mind when it can't hope to reconcile itself with events
—  I too was standing between routine and the unknowable.
Maybe all Americans who suffer from melancholy act as if they have gone mad. But I truly thought he might throw himself in the river, and I don't want his ghost visiting to keep telling me he's sorry.
— Amy Tan, The Valley of Amazement
I am an artist. And An artist is simply a man who is pulled along by a river: on one side sanity lies, and the other madness, yet he will find no peace on either, as the current of his art drags him away from the everyday life on it's banks, where others watch, unable to help him until he reaches the immensity of the ocean.
— Félix J. Palma, The Map of the Sky
There is a difference between being mad and being surrounded by retards.
— Blanco
If you think that I am mad now, then take away my books, and you'll find I've completely gone insane!
— Jen Selinsky
You understand the logic behind the illogical, Alyssa. It's in your nature to find tranquility amid the madness. And that's what we're doing here. We are giving our food a fighting chance.
— A.G. Howard, Splintered
All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.
— Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale
No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.- Aristotle (Attributed by Seneca in Moral Essays, "De Tranquillitate Animi" On Tranquility of Mind, sct. 17, subsct. 10.)
— Aristotle
Ten days is time enough to die, to be born, to fall in love and to go mad. Ten days is a very long time.
— Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall
They certified that I was sane; but I know that I am mad." This confession gives us the key to what is most important and significant in Tolstoy's hidden life.
— Lev Shestov, In Job's Balances: On the Sources of the Eternal Truths
Perhaps it was a passing moment of madness after all. There is no trace of it any more. My odd feelings of the other week seem to me quite ridiculous today: I can no longer enter into them.
— Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
In our hallway, ablaze with welcoming lights, my Lolita peeled off her sweater, shook her gemmed hair, stretched towards me two bare arms, raised one knee:“Carry me upstairs, please. I feel sort of romantic tonight.”It may interest physiologists to learn, at this point, that I have the ability - a most singular case, I presume - of shedding torrents of tears throughout the other tempest.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
That night I slept badly, thrashing about in my bed, not quite asleep and not quite awake. At times I had the feeling there was someone else in my bedroom who was talking to me, but of course I could not deal with this perception in any realistic way, since I was half-asleep and half-awake, and thus, for all practical purposes, I was out of my mind.
— Thomas Ligotti, Teatro Grottesco
When life is this dull, you have to invent purpose. Collecting torn-up newspaper gives you a hobby, provides an anchoring intimacy with your surroundings, keeps the streets clean. Or so you think. Then one day you wake up and realise that it was all a con: what you had thought was an escape from madness was in fact the arrival.
— Alexander Masters, Stuart: A Life Backwards
When love is not madness, it is not love...
— Anushka Bhartiya
An exaltation of spirit lifted me, as it were, far above the earth and the sinful creatures crawling on its surface; and I deemed myself as an eagle among the children of men, soaring on high, and looking down with pity and contempt on the grovelling creatures below.
— James Hogg
Jessie had never heard you could inherit madness. She thought madness was something that just happened to people in Shakespeare when the wind got up.
— Lynne Truss, Tennyson's Gift: Stories from the Lynne Truss Omnibus, Book 2
They ask me what is madness and I reply it is a gift.They ask me why, and I said:The world trough the eyes of normal people is boring, but look at it trough the eyes of the mad, then you will know why I enjoy my madness so much!
— Seid Šabanović
With every vial of success there is always a pinch of madness.
— Gunther Bearklawth
Madness and witchery as well as bestiality are conditions commonly associated with the use of the female voice in public.
— Anne Carson
She screamed. Her screaming was beautiful. But, truth be told he missed the crying.
— Barry Lyga, Game
... your grasp, even in fury, would have a charm for me...
— Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre