“I like you because you were mad. And you're pretty. And pretty sane for a mad person.”
Maureen Johnson book 13 Little Blue Envelopes
Source: 13 Little Blue Envelopes
Life, p. 9
Collected Poems (1993)
Source: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
“I like you because you were mad. And you're pretty. And pretty sane for a mad person.”
Maureen Johnson book 13 Little Blue Envelopes
Source: 13 Little Blue Envelopes
“In a mad world, only the mad are sane!”
Akira Kurosawa (1910–1998) Japanese film maker
Ran (1985)
Variant: In a mad world, only the mad are sane.
“And now have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the senses?”
Edgar Allan Poe book The Tell-Tale Heart
The Tell-Tale Heart (1843)
Context: And now have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the senses? -- now, I say, there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sound too. It was the beating of the old man's heart. It increased my fury, as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage.
“To be sane in a world of madman is in itself madness.”
Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) Genevan philosopher
“In the country of the mad, the sane man is crazy.”
Edmund Cooper (1926–1982) British writer
The Overman Culture (1971)
“He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.”
Rafael Sabatini book Scaramouche
This is the opening line of the novel. Sabatini used it as his epitaph.
Variant: He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. And that was all his patrimony.
Source: Scaramouche (1921), Ch. I: "The Republican"