Quotes about madness
page 5

“I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.

--From the poem "Mad Girl's Love Song”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

Love, Way, Girl, Forgetting

“Some people are attracted to sickness, to the kind of madness where sparks fly
off the head, to the incoherence of despair, masked by nervous energy, which winds up looking like bewildered joy.”

Luke Davies (1962) Australian writer

Source: Candy

People, Joy, Flying, Despair

“You can be as mad as a mad dog at the way things went, you can curse the fates, but when it comes to the end, you have to let go.”

Eric Roth (1945) American screenwriter

Source: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Screenplay

Fate, Dogs, Way

“Much madness is divinest sense
To a discerning eye;
Much sense the starkest madness.
’T is the majority
In this, as all, prevails.
Assent, and you are sane;
Demur,—you ’re straightway dangerous,
And handled with a chain.”

Emily Dickinson book The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

Life, p. 9
Collected Poems (1993)
Source: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

Sense

“I was Marked by a very cute boy with terrible impulse control. I don't remember because I was basically unconscious but everyone was mad at him when I woke up. The end, love Clary.”

Cassandra Clare book The Shadowhunter's Codex

Source: The Shadowhunter's Codex

Love, Boy

“Suddenly, madness was everywhere, and I was determined to learn about the impact it had on the way society evolves. I've always believed society to be a fundamentally rational thing, but what if it isn't? What if it is built on insanity?”

Jon Ronson (1967) British journalist, documentary filmmaker, radio presenter and nonfiction author

Source: The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry

Way, Learning

“Artemis: If I win I'm a prodigy. If I lose then I'm mad. That is the way history is written.”

Eoin Colfer Artemis Fowl

Variant: If I win, I'm a prodigy. If I lose, then I'm crazy. That's the way history is written.
Source: Artemis Fowl (2001)

Way, History

“Are you still mad because i broke your phone" Jace said. "Because you broke my wrist, so i'd said we're even"
"It was sprained," Alec said. "Not broken, sprained”

Cassandra Clare book City of Heavenly Fire

Source: City of Heavenly Fire

“Life is not so idiotically mathematical that only the big eat the small; it is just as common for a bee to kill a lion or at least to drive it mad.”

August Strindberg Miss Julie

Source: Miss Julie

Life, Mathematics, Bee

“If you're ever in doubt, throw a pepper in the air. If it fails to come down, you have gone mad, so don't trust in anything.”

Gregory Maguire (1954) Novelist

Source: Mirror Mirror

“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"

World, Sense, Laughter

“Often-times it's madness, not genius that moves the world forward. Who else but the mad would reach so far, stretching for the impossible and, in so doing, prove the impossible possible!”

James Rollins Black Order

Source: Black Order

World, Time

“Why wouldn’t we run to God. He’s sooo good. God’s not mad at anybody. He just wants to help us be the best that we can be.”

Joyce Meyer (1943) American author and speaker

God, Help

“You see the great thing about madness is that it's all in your head.”

Brandon Sanderson book Warbreaker

Lightsong the Bold
Source: Warbreaker (2009)

“The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It's quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.”

Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) South african Nobel-winning writer

Source: Conversations With Nadine Gordimer

Solitude

“Madness is only a variety of mental nonconformity and we are all individualists here.”

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1896–1953) American novelist

Source: Cross Creek

“War." Gorgon spits the word. "That is what they call it to give the illusion of honor and law. It is chaos. Madness and blood and the hunger to win. It has always been thus and shall always be so.”

Libba Bray book The Sweet Far Thing

Source: The Sweet Far Thing

Hunger, War, Law

“I see that a man cannot give himself up to drinking without being miserable one half his days and mad the other”

Anne Brontë book The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Source: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Ch. XXII : Traits of Friendship; Arthur to Helen
Context: I see that a man cannot give himself up to drinking without being miserable one half his days and mad the other; besides, I like to enjoy my life at all sides and ends, which cannot be done by one that suffers himself to be the slave of a single propensity.

Drink

“wanting what you could not have led to misery and madness”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Prince

Source: Clockwork Prince

“The next time you're mad at me, talk to me,' he said. 'Don't shut me out. I don't like playing games. And by the way, I had a great time, too.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Last Song

Source: The Last Song

Way, Game, Time

“To put meaning in one's life may end in madness,
But life without meaning is the torture
Of restlessness and vague desire--
It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.”

Edgar Lee Masters book Spoon River Anthology

Source: Spoon River Anthology

Life, Sea

“Enough madness? Enough? And how do you measure madness? - The Joker”

Grant Morrison (1960) writer

Source: Batman: Arkham Asylum

“The images I had were of people being driven mad by living in the city. Images of parents who were so hungry and unfulfilled that they ate their own children.”

Bret Easton Ellis book Less Than Zero

Source: Less Than Zero

Children, People, Parent

“All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways.”

Yann Martel book Life of Pi

Source: Life of Pi

Way

“The poet makes himself a voyant through a long, immense reasoned deranging of all his senses. All the forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he tries to find himself, he exhausts in himself all the poisons, to keep only their quintessences.”

Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) French Decadent and Symbolist poet

Love, Sense, Suffering

“You will say that I am old and mad, was what Michaelangelo wrote, but I answer that there is no better way of being sane and free from anxiety than by being mad.”

David Markson book Wittgenstein's Mistress

Source: Wittgenstein's Mistress

Way

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.”

Allen Ginsberg book Howl

Howl (1956)

Night

“I know how you are with your words, and, Will- I love all of them. Every word you say. The silly ones, the mad ones, the beautiful ones, and the ones that are only for me. I love them, and I love you." - Tessa Gray”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Princess

Source: Clockwork Princess

Love, Beauty

“A great many men are mad, and no one knows it. They do not know it themselves”

Agatha Christie The Secret Adversary

Source: The Secret Adversary

Men

“Madness slunk in through a chink in History. It only took a moment.”

Arundhati Roy book The God of Small Things

Source: The God of Small Things

History

“In my madness I was actually in love with her for the few hours it all lasted; it was the same unmistakable ache and stab across the mind, the same sighs, the same pain, and above all the same reluctance and fear to approach.”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Source: On the Road

Love, Pain, Fear

“All of those faeries and duels and mad queens and so on, and no one quoted old Billy Shakespeare. Not even once.”

Jim Butcher book Summer Knight

Source: Summer Knight

Quotes

“I don't know. I do think, half of what we call madness is just some poor slob dealing with pain by a strategy that annoys the people around him.”

Lois McMaster Bujold book Mirror Dance

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Mirror Dance (1994)

Pain, People, Thinking

“To be a woman is a great adventure;
To drive men mad is a heroic thing.”

Borís Pasternak book Doctor Zhivago

Source: Doctor Zhivago

Men

“I suppose I really seemed mad, then; but it was only through the awfulness of having said nothing but the truth, and being thought to be deluded.”

Sarah Waters book Fingersmith

Source: Fingersmith

Truth

“They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.”

Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) Welsh poet and writer

" And Death Shall Have No Dominion http://www.internal.org/view_poem.phtml?poemID=277", st. 1 (1943) Source: Collected Poems

Love, Death, Star, Lovers

“… we shall board our imagined ship and wildly sail among sacred islands of the mad till death shatters the fabulous stars and makes us real.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

Source: The Collected Poems

Death, Imagination, Star

“Pain is real when you get other people to believe in it. If no one believes in it but you, your pain is madness or hysteria.”

Naomi Wolf book The Beauty Myth

Source: The Beauty Myth (1991), Chapter 7 : 'Violence', p. 254

Pain, People

“Speak to me."
"I hate you."
"Okay." Mad Rogan let go of me. "You're fine.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Burn for Me

Hate

“The mad rarely know that they are mad. It's the rest of the world, I think, that seems insane to them.”

Jim Butcher (1971) American author

World, Thinking

“Of course I’ve gone mad with power! Have you ever tried going mad without power? It’s boring and no one listens to you!
— Russ Cargill”

Matt Groening (1954) American cartoonist

“Let us be separated by wars and pestilence, death, madness but not by the passing of time.”

Mario Puzo book Fools Die

Source: Fools Die

Death, War, Time

“When you are mad, mad like this, you don't know it. Reality is what you see. When what you see shifts, departing from anyone else's reality, it's still reality to you.”

Marya Hornbacher (1974) American journalist

Source: Madness: A Bipolar Life

Reality

“You did what you did out of love. I can't be mad at you over that. It was stupid, but that's how love is. Do you have any idea what I'd do for you? To keep you safe?”

Richelle Mead book Spirit Bound

Source: Spirit Bound

Love, Stupidity, Idea

“He broke the kiss and leaned against her, breathing hard. "Good morning to you, too. Man, I just can't stay mad when you do that.”

Rachel Caine (1962) American writer

Source: Midnight Alley

Kiss

“Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee, as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.”

Herman Melville (1818–1891) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet

Source: Moby-Dick or, The Whale

Wisdom, Time

“And I think that you do not understand that sometimes the only choice is between acceptance and madness.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Angel

Variant: Sometimes the only choice is between acceptance and madness.
Source: Clockwork Angel

Understanding, Thinking

“Everyone is more or less mad on one point.”

Rudyard Kipling book Plain Tales from the Hills

On the Strength of a Likeness.
Plain Tales from the Hills (1888)

“Then when I saw Pain attack Hinata, I was so mad, so full of rage, I let the Nine-Tails take over without even thinking about it.”

Masashi Kishimoto (1974) Japanese manga artist

Pain, Thinking, Rage

“Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

October 18, 1936 Fire
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

“I have both held and beheld unlimited power and of it I know but one thing. It drives men mad.'
- Alexander the Great”

Matthew Reilly (1974) Australian author

Source: Seven Deadly Wonders

Men

“Ruin, eldest daughter of Zeus, she blinds us all, that fatal madness—she with those delicate feet of hers, never touching the earth, gliding over the heads of men to trap us all. She entangles one man, now another.”

Homér Iliad

Source: The Iliad

Men, Daughters

“If someone's different from you and it scares you or makes you mad, that's God telling you to take a closer look. If you're scared or mad, that's about you, not about the person who scares you or angers you.”

Chris Crutcher book Deadline

Source: Deadline

God, Personality, Anger

“Mad people = People who stand alone and burn.
I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.”

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist

People

“Who but the mad would choose to keep on living? In the end, aren't we all just a little crazy?”

Libba Bray Going Bovine

Source: Going Bovine

“Goats," said Maxwell Hyde, "are a special case. Mad as hatters, all of them.”

Diana Wynne Jones book The Merlin Conspiracy

Source: The Merlin Conspiracy

“There was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.”

Hunter S. Thompson book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Source: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Sense, Universe

“We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

Joyce Carol Oates (1938) American author

Art, Passion

“If he waits for the ideal moment, he will never set off; he requires a touch of madness to take the next step. The warrior uses that touch of madness. For - in both love and war - it is impossible to foresee everything.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Source: Warrior of the Light

Love, War, Waiting

“I don't get mad, I get even.”

Patricia Briggs (1965) American writer

“Ah," said the jailer, "do not always brood over what is impossible, or you will be mad in a fortnight.”

Alexandre Dumas book The Count of Monte Cristo

Source: The Count of Monte Cristo

“The illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

World, Help

“Oh -- who's the Queen?"

"Her, of course. The White Queen. You're just like Alice, you know. Down the rabbit hole with the Mad Hatter.”

Rachel Caine (1962) American writer

Source: Midnight Alley

“Madness, mayhem, erotic vandalism, devastation of innumerable souls - while we scream and perish, History licks a finger and turns the page.”

Thomas Ligotti (1953) American horror author

Soul, History

“Are you mad? (Artemis)
Yes, I am. Mad at this world where we are nothing to the gods. Mad at the Fates who put us here for no purpose except to toy with us for their petty amusement. I wish all of the gods were dead and gone. (Acheron)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Acheron

God, Fate, World, Dead

“I had a dream that all the babies prevented by the pill showed up. They were mad.”

Steven Wright (1955) American actor and author

Dreams, Baby

“No amount of love can cure madness or unblacken one's dark moods. Love can help, it can make the pain more tolerable, but, always, one is beholden to medication that may or may not always work and may or may not be bearable”

Kay Redfield Jamison (1946) American bipolar disorder researcher

Source: An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

Love, Pain, Mood, Help

“Maybe I should drive,” Troy said. “She knows what she’s doing,” Mad Rogan said. I sniffed. “What?” “The fragrance of a genuine compliment from Mad Rogan. So rare and sweet.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Burn for Me

“We are not mad. We are human. We want to love, and someone must forgive us for the paths we take to love, for the paths are many and dark, and we are ardent and cruel in our journey.”

Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) Canadian poet and singer-songwriter

Source: Leonard Cohen: Poems and Songs

Love, Forgiveness

“You said I killed you-haunt me, then! […] Be with me always-take any form-drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!”

Emily Brontë book Wuthering Heights

Source: Wuthering Heights

“What is it about meter and cadence and rhythm that makes their makers mad?”

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

Source: Girl, Interrupted

“They are not mad. They're trained to believe, not to know. Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous.”

Frank Herbert book Dune Messiah

Source: Dune Messiah

Knowledge, Training

“I never said that. I just didn't correct you when you were, you know, wrong. Anyway, I just saved you from being burned to death, so I figure you're not allowed to be mad." -Jace”

Cassandra Clare book City of Glass

Source: City of Glass

Death

“Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form.”

Herman Melville (1818–1891) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet

Source: Moby-Dick or, The Whale

Thinking

“To see the madness and yet walk a perfect silver line…. That's what the true story-teller should be: a great guide, a clear mind, who can walk a silver line in hell or madness.”

Ben Okri (1959) Nigerian writer

Source: Birds of Heaven

Hell, Perfection

“Like the famous mad philosopher said, when you stare into the void, the void stares also; but if you cast into the void, you get a type conversion error. (Which just goes to show Nietzsche wasn't a C++ programmer.)”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

The Fuller Memorandum (2010)
The Laundry Files
Source: Overtime

Error

“I think there are two different oceans - the one that plays with you in the summer, and the one that gets so mad in the winter.”

Jodi Picoult book Handle With Care

Source: Handle with Care

Thinking, Winter, Summer

“They all think medicine should be magic, and they become mad at me when it's not.”

Neal Shusterman (1962) American novelist

Source: Challenger Deep

Thinking

“The universe is mad, slightly mad.”

Allen Ginsberg book Reality Sandwiches

Source: Reality Sandwiches

Universe

“Flirting with madness was one thing; when madness started flirting back, it was time to call the whole thing off.”

Rohinton Mistry A Fine Balance

Source: A Fine Balance

Time

“Writing isn't just a job that stops at six thirty… It's a mad, sexy, sad, scary, ruthless, joyful, and utterly, utterly personal thing. There's not the writer and then me; there's just me. All of my life connects to the writing. All of it.”

Russell T. Davies (1963) Screenwriter, former executive producer of Doctor Who

Life, Sadness, Personality

“From time to time, I do consider that I might be mad. Like any self-respecting lunatic, however, I am always quick to dismiss any doubts about my sanity.”

Dean Koontz Odd Thomas

Source: Odd Thomas

Time

“You never get mad,” she said when their server left the table. “Except at me.”
“That’s not true,” he said tightly. “Torie can get me going.”
“Torie doesn’t count. You were obviously her mother in a previous life.”

Susan Elizabeth Phillips (1948) American writer

Source: Call Me Irresistible

Life

“I have loved women even to madness, but I have always loved liberty better.”

Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) Italian adventurer and author from the Republic of Venice

Love, Women

“She gives him what he can only call a sweet smile. 'So you are determined to go on being bad. Mad, bad, and dangerous to know. I promise, no one will ask you to change.”

J.M. Coetzee book Disgrace

Source: Disgrace

Smile, Change

“In a mad world it always seems simpler to obey.”

Graham Greene book Our Man in Havana

Our Man in Havana (1958)

World

“Dancing music, music sad,
Both together, sane and mad…”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

Sadness, Music, Dance

“Who is that?”
“Your replacement.”
“You replaced me with a shaved poodle?”
“He's got mad skills.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Bleeds

“Great. She shook her head. Not only am I having conversations with myself, but now I'm refusing to talk to me. This has got to be the first sign of madness.”

Trudi Canavan book The High Lord

Source: The High Lord

“A man must sometimes laugh at himself or go mad,’ said he. ‘Few realize it. That is why there are so many madmen in the world.”

Rafael Sabatini book Captain Blood

Source: Captain Blood

World

“I shouldn't precisely have chosen madness if there had been any choice, but once such a thing has taken hold of you, you can't very well get out of it.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

“Am I mad, to see what others do not see, or are they mad who are responsible for all that I am seeing?”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

“Turn away. From the darkness, the madness, the pain. Open your eyes and look at the light.”

Jennifer Donnelly book Revolution

Source: Revolution

Pain, Light

“A people that has remained convinced of its greatness and invulnerability, that has chosen to believe such a myth in the face of all the evidence, is a people in the grip of a kind of sleep, or madness.”

Salman Rushdie book The Satanic Verses

Source: The Satanic Verses

People, Sleep

“Madness, and then illumination.”

Orson Scott Card book Xenocide

Source: Xenocide

“Stare at me in this faceless way, go mad with desire, and rip my clothes off. It's terrific. In my sex fantasy, nobody ever loves me for my mind. The fantasy of rape — of which mine is in a kind of prepubescent sub-category — is common enough among women and (in mirror image) among men.”

Nora Ephron (1941–2012) Film director, author screenwriter

Nora Ephron: Crazy Salad: Some Things About Women, Knopf Publishing, New York, 1975

Love, Women, Men, Sex

“Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad.”

Euripidés (-480–-406 BC) ancient Athenian playwright

Anonymous ancient proverb, wrongly attributed to Euripides. The version here is quoted as a "heathen proverb" in Daniel, a Model for Young Men (1854) by William Anderson Scott. The origin of the misattribution to Euripides is unknown. Several variants are quoted in ancient texts, as follows. Variants and derived paraphrases: For cunningly of old was the celebrated saying revealed: evil sometimes seems good to a man whose mind a god leads to destruction. Sophocles, Antigone 620-3, a play pre-dating any of Euripides' surviving plays. An ancient commentary explains the passage as a paraphrase of the following, from another, earlier poet. When a god plans harm against a man, he first damages the mind of the man he is plotting against. Quoted in the scholia vetera to Sophocles' Antigone 620ff., without attribution. The meter (iambic trimeter) suggests that the source of the quotation is a tragic play. For whenever the anger of divine spirits harms someone, it first does this: it steals away his mind and good sense, and turns his thought to foolishness, so that he should know nothing of his mistakes. Attributed to "some of the old poets" by Lycurgus of Athens in his Oratio In Leocratem [Oration Against Leocrates], section 92. Again, the meter suggests that the source is a tragic play. These lines are misattributed to the much earlier semi-mythical statesman Lycurgus of Sparta in a footnote of recent editions of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations and other works. The gods do nothing until they have blinded the minds of the wicked. Variant in 'Dictionary of Quotations (Classical) (1906), compiled by Thomas Benfield Harbottle, p. 433. Whom Fortune wishes to destroy she first makes mad. Publilius Syrus, Maxim 911 The devil when he purports any evil against man, first perverts his mind. As quoted by Athenagoras of Athens [citation needed] quem Iuppiter vult perdere, dementat prius. "Whom Jupiter wishes to destroy, he first sends mad"; neo-Latin version. Similar wording is found in James Duport's Homeri Gnomologia (1660), p. 234. "A maxim of obscure origin which may have been invented in Cambridge about 1640" -- Taylor, The Proverb (1931). Probably a variant of the line "He whom the gods love dies young", derived from Menander's play The Double Deceiver via Plautus (Bacchides 816-7). quem (or quos) Deus perdere vult, dementat prius. Whom God wishes to destroy, he first sends mad. Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad. This variant is spoken by Prometheus, in The Masque of Pandora (1875) by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad. As quoted in George Fox Interpreted: The Religion, Revelations, Motives and Mission of George Fox (1881) by Thomas Ellwood Longshore, p. 154 Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first makes mad. As quoted in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations 16th edition (1992) Nor do the gods appear in warrior's armour clad To strike them down with sword and spear Those whom they would destroy They first make mad. Bhartṛhari, 7th c. AD; as quoted in John Brough,Poems from the Sanskrit, (1968), p, 67 vināśakāle viparītabuddhiḥ Sanskrit Saying (also in Jatak katha): "When a man is to be destroyed, his intelligence becomes self-destructive." Modern derivatives: The proverb's meaning is changed in many English versions from the 20th and 21st centuries that start with the proverb's first half (through "they") and then end with a phrase that replaces "first make mad" or "make mad." Such versions can be found at Internet search engines by using either of the two keyword phrases that are on Page 2 and Page 4 of the webpage " Pick any Wrong Card http://www.bu.edu/av/celop2/not_ESL/pick_any_wrong_card.pdf." The rest of that webpage is frameworks that induce a reader to compose new variations on this proverb. Misattributed

God

“There are worse things than being mad.”

Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) American writer

This appears not to be a Kerouac quote. It has not been found in any of Kerouac's published work.
Misattributed