Misery (1987)
Source: Cibola Burn (2014), Chapter 34 (p. 345)
“Genius is one of the many forms of insanity.”
As quoted in Born under Saturn: the character and conduct of artists : a documented history from antiquity to the French Revolution (1963) by Margot Wittkower.
Source: Way Station (1963), Ch. 25
Context: That had not been the first time nor had it been the last, but all the years of killing boiled down in essence to that single moment — not the time that came after, but that long and terrible instant when he had watched the lines of men purposefully striding up the slope to kill him.
It had been in that moment that he had realized the insanity of war, the futile gesture that in time became all but meaningless, the unreasoning rage that must be nursed long beyond the memory of the incident that had caused the rage, the sheer illogic that one man, by death or misery, might prove a right or uphold a principle.
Somewhere, he thought, on the long backtrack of history, the human race had accepted an insanity for a principle and had persisted in it until today that insanity-turned-principle stood ready to wipe out, if not the race itself, at least all of those things, both material and immaterial, that had been fashioned as symbols of humanity through many hard-won centuries.
Variant: The area dividing the brain and the soul
Is affected in many ways by experience --
Some lose all mind and become soul:
insane.
Some lose all soul and become mind:
intellectual.
Some lose both and become:
accepted.
Source: You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense
Source: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Ch. XI : The Vicar Again; Gilbert to Rose
Advertisement to the Second Edition, p. vii
Principles of Political Economy (Second Edition 1836)
Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes
Song lyrics, Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes (1977)
Tears streamed down my dad’s face. “I was about nine or ten, the same ag
Burro Genius: A Memoir (2004)
