quotations about madness
I am not mad; I would to heaven I were!
For then, 'tis like I should forget myself.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
King John
Somewhere in the depths of solitude, beyond wilderness and freedom, lay the trap of madness.
EDWARD ABBEY
The Monkey Wrench Gang
It's better to face madness with a plan than to sit still and let it take you in pieces.
JOSH MALERMAN
Bird Box
In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.
DON DELILLO
The Names
I sometimes think we must be all mad and that we shall wake to sanity in strait-waistcoats.
BRAM STOKER
Dracula
First sign of madness, talking to your own head.
J. K. ROWLING
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Madness is not real; what is real is audiences' response to and labeling of certain actors and behaviors as "mad."
CAROL A. B. WARREN
Court of Last Resort: Mental Illness and the Law
When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies?
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
Don Quixote
Madness is not ours alone, but part of the human condition; we cannot segregate it over there apart from our own lives.
ANN BELFORD ULANOV
Madness and Creativity
Fetter strong madness in a silken thread.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Much Ado About Nothing
I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.
SYLVIA PLATH
"Elm", Ariel
And what is an authentic madman? It is a man who preferred to become mad, in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society
There are so many kinds of madness, so many ways in which the human brain may go wrong; and so often it happens that what we call madness is both reasonable and just. It is so. Yes. A little reason is good for us, a little more makes wise men of some of us--but when our reason over-grows us and we reach too far, something breaks and we go insane.
JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD
"The Case of Beauvais", Back to God's Country and Other Stories
The constitution of madness as a mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, affords the evidence of a broken dialogue, posits the separation as already effected, and thrusts into oblivion all those stammered, imperfect words without fixed syntax in which the exchange between madness and reason was made. The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue of reason about madness, has been established only on the basis of such a silence.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
preface, Madness and Civilization
In ancient Greek culture, the image of madness is that of a black, angry, inner flood. The organic source of madness is black liquid. It seethes up from below, manifesting itself in uncontrolled passion, illness, and violence. It rebels against order and tradition. It wanders from its natural course. And in some instances ... the madness passes, and the mad are left to contemplate the destruction they have wrought.
GARY ROSENSHIELD
Pushkin and the Genres of Madness: The Masterpieces of 1833
Even if one understands that what one is doing is mad, it is indeed still madness.
GUILLERMO DEL TORO & CHUCK HOGAN
The Fall
Anger is a brief madness.
HORACE
Epistles
You are trying to understand madness with logic. This is not unlike searching for darkness with a torch.
BRIAN K. VAUGHN
Detective Comics #787
When man deploys the arbitrary nature of his madness, he confronts the dark necessity of the world; the animal that haunts his nightmares and his nights of privation is his own nature, which will lay bare hell's pitiless truth.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
Madness & Civilization
Madness is traumatic; it tears us from our familiar self, leaving a gap so big that it threatens us with no return once we fall into it. Trauma brings its own vocabulary, which we learn bit by bit in the aftermath of the shocking event that instigates it.
ANN BELFORD ULANOV
Madness and Creativity