Going Mad Quotes

She wondered if she was going mad. It felt like a decision she could make. One small step over an invisible line and she could choose lunacy. ~ Liane Moriarty

I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind - and to work some of those contradictions out for myself. ~ Michel De Montaigne

[Shakespeare realized that] Women are able to understand themselves better on a personal level and survive in the world if they dress in men's clothing, thus living underground, safe (...). The presence of women disguising themselves as men dictates that the play be a comedy; women remaining in their frocks, a tragedy. In four great tragedies -Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear- almost all the women die (...).
How much the women have to adhere to the rules and regulations of their enviroment makes a large difference. Once Rosalind [disguised as a man in As You Like It] has run away from the court, she has no institutional structures to deal with. Ophelia [in her frocks] is surrounded tightly by institutional structures of family, court, and politics; only by going mad can be get out of it all. ~ Tina Packer

Sometimes I think I am going mad. I live for days in the mystery and tears of things so that the commonest object, the most familiar face- even my own- become ghostly, unreal, enigmatic. I get into an attitude of almost total scepticism, nescience, solipsism, in a world of dumb, sphinx-like things that cannot explain themselves. The discovery of how I am situated- a sentient being on a globe in space overshadows me. I wish I were just nothing. ~ W.N.P. Barbellion

Stupidity often saves a man from going mad. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

And our madness-measure is always changing. Probably we are less tolerant of madness now than at any period in history. There is no place for it. Crucially, there is no time for it.

Going mad takes time. Getting sane takes time. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Like you, I grew up in a remote animist village. But then I went to a strict Catholic education in France. I was perfectly content to accept the grand Shee Yee of the Otherworld and the Lord B, and Jesus and his mother as my spiritual icons as long as I didn't have to spend too long on my knees. I would have settled for a committee. I just wanted order. But once I started to see my own ghosts I understood what these religions were all about. They were clubs set up by people like me to stop themselves from going mad. You know what I really think happens? You die. You wait for your number. There's a bit of time to take care of unfinished business. And you pass on. And, as you don't come back, nobody actually knows what you pass on to. But that description has never been acceptable. People want an ending. They don't want to vanish into thin air. So these great religious gurus made some endings up. The more comfortable and happy your ending, the more members signed up and paid their fees. And the kings and emperors started to add rules and regulations to subjugate the commoners and keep them in line. As so they invented hell and told you if you coveted your neighbor's mule you wouldn't even get into the clubhouse at the end of it all. ~ Colin Cotterill

Madness--that's all they have, after working sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. Going mad is their only way of staying sane. ~ J.G. Ballard

Sometimes I wonder if I'm going mad. Perhaps it is due to the pressure of knowing that I must somehow bear the burden of an entire world. Perhaps it is caused by the death I have seen, the friends I have lost. The friends I have been forced to kill. ~ Brandon Sanderson

Popular culture has twisted it, but popular culture has twisted madness in general. They make it funny, they romanticize it, or they make it exaggerated. But true mental illness is nothing to laugh at. I stayed in the Birdcage for some time, I've seen scary things, and I've become numb to a great deal, but going mad is perhaps the scariest. ~ Wildbow

He felt something on his neck. Warmth.
He hesitated, then turned weary eyes toward the sky. Sunlight bathed his face. He gaped; it seemed so long since he'd seen pure sunlight. It shone down through a large break in the clouds, comforting, like the warmth of an oven baking a loaf of Adrinne's thick sourdough bread.
Almen stood, raising a hand to shade his eyes. He took a deep, long breath, and smelled… apple blossoms? He spun with a start.
The apple trees were flowering.
That was plain ridiculous. He rubbed his eyes, but that didn't dispel the image. They were blooming, all of them, white flowers breaking out between the leaves.
[...] What was happening? Apple trees didn't blossom twice. Was he going mad?
Footsteps sounded softly on the path that ran past the orchard. Almen spun to find a tall young man walking down out of the foothills. He had deep red hair and he wore ragged clothing: a brown cloak with loose sleeves and a simple white linen shirt beneath. The trousers were finer, black with a delicate embroidery of gold at the cuff.
"Ho, stranger," Almen said, raising a hand, not knowing what else to say, not even sure if he'd seen what he thought he'd seen. "Did you… did you get lost up in the foothills?"
The man stopped, turning sharply. He seemed surprised to find Almen there. With a start, Almen realized the man's left arm ended in a stump.
The stranger looked about, then breathed in deeply. "No. I'm not lost. Finally. It fe ~ Robert Jordan

If he slept, he dreamt of the woman with the icy white irises. She exploded planes, swallowed oceans and crumpled skies
in her palm in his dreams. Sometimes she and the green-eyed girl were one. At other times, the green-eyed girl was alone, a gaping hole where her heart should have been. At all times he could hear the woman's cold, low laughter. It swept across his consciousness like a hailstorm.
When he woke up, he thought he was going mad. ~ Sukanya Venkatraghavan

Okay, okay . . . where do you hear it coming from?"
"Around here somewhere."
"Always in this spot?"
"No. Not always. You are going to think I am even more insane, but I swear it is following me around."
"Maybe it is my new powers. The power to drive you mad." She wriggled her fingers at him theatrically as if she were casting a curse on him.
"You already drive me mad," he teased, dragging her up against him and nibbling her neck with a playful growling. "Ah hell," he broke off. "I really am going mad. I cannot believe you cannot hear that. It is like a metronome set to some ridiculously fast speed."
He turned and walked into the living room, looking around at every shelf.
"The last person to own this place probably had a thing for music and left it running. Listen. Can you hear that?"
"No," she said thoughtfully, "but I can hear you hearing it if I concentrate on your thoughts. What in the world . . . ?"
Gideon turned, then turned again, concentrating on the rapid sound, following it until it led him right up to his wife.
"It is you!" he said. "No wonder it is following me around. Are you wearing a watch?" He grabbed her wrist and she rolled her eyes.
"A Demon wearing a watch? Now I have heard everything."
Suddenly Gideon went very, very still, the cold wash of chills that flooded through him so strong that she shivered with the overflow of sensation. He abruptly dropped to his knees and framed her hips with his hand ~ Jacquelyn Frank

Was I going mad? I prayed for warmth and daylight. I prayed for my sanity. ~ Robin Bridges

I think you're very lucky to find somebody you can coexist with without straying or going mad or being angry. That's whether you're Liam Gallagher and Nicole Appleton, Robbie Williams and Ayda Field, or Tim and June from down the road. ~ Robbie Williams

Was it really possible she was dead?
But the alternative was not much better. Because if she wasn't, the only other possibility - and suddenly I wasn't sure if it was better or worse - was that I was going mad. ~ Ruth Ware

He was going mad and knew it, and
somewhere deep inside a bit of sanity was screaming, struggling to fight off
the hopeless flood of black terror. It was very horrible to go mad and know
that you were going mad
to know that in a little minute you would be here
physically and yet all the real essence would be dead and drowned in the
black madness. For this was the Dark
the Dark and the Cold and the Doom. ~ Isaac Asimov

God, he was going mad. The feel of her soft curves against him was heaven. He tightened his arms around her, pressing her softness to him. Why did men like skinny girls? He didn't want to feel bones when he pulled a woman close, he wanted to sink into the suppleness, hold on to smooth flesh as he gripped her hips and drove his erection into her hot, wet heat. ~ Tamara Hoffa

The world is going mad in mutual extermination, and murder, considered as a crime when committed individually, becomes a virtue when it is committed by large numbers. It is the multiplication of the frenzy that assures impunity to the assassins. ~ Cyprian

When once we have discovered how pain and suffering diminish the personality and how joy alone increases it, then the morbid attraction which is felt for evil, pain and abnormality will have lost its power. Why do we reward our men of genius, our suicides, our madmen and the generally maladjusted with the melancholy honours of a posthumous curiosity? Because we know that it is our society which has condemned these men to death and which is guilty because, out of its own ignorance and malformation, it has persecuted those who were potential saviours; smiters of the rock who might have touched the spring of healing and brought us back into harmony with ourselves. Somehow, then, and without going mad, we must learn from these madmen to reconcile fanaticism with serenity. Either one, taken alone, is disastrous, yet except through the integration of these two opposites there can be no great art and no profound happiness--and what else is worth having? For nothing can be accomplished without fanaticism and without serenity nothing can be enjoyed. ~ Cyril Connolly

The 'Aladdin' thing - that's not work; that's just fun. Three days in the recording studio going mad, then the animators do all the work. Not a bad way to cash a large check, my friend. ~ Robin Williams

Anybody who has ever tried to rectify an injustice or set a record straight comes to feel that he is going mad. ~ Mary McCarthy

Does God think that, because it is raining, I am not going to destroy the world? - Lope de Aguirre after going mad in the Amazon ~ David Grann

i'm going mad, i told myself. let me not be mad. ~ Ian McEwan

I saw the infernal Thing blocking my path in the twilight. The dead travel fast, and by short cuts unknown to ordinary coolies. I laughed aloud a second time, and checked my laughter suddenly, for I was afraid I was going mad. ~ Rudyard Kipling

I suppose an active imagination can be a form of madness. Or it can be the thing that keeps you from going mad. ~ Esme Raji Codell

I've known a lot of people go mad over the years, and it is more distressing than people dying. People dying is quite natural, people going mad is the complete antithesis of that. ~ Alan Moore

I feel certain that I'm going mad again, I feel we can't go thru another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices ~ Virginia Woolf

The point is, you see," said Ford, "that there is no point in driving yourself mad trying to stop yourself going mad. You might just as well give in and save your sanity for later. ~ Douglas Adams

Arthur, you mustn't feel that I am rude when I say this. You must remember that I have been away in strange and desert places, sometimes quite alone, sometimes in a boat with nobody but God and the whistling sea. Do you know, since I have been back with people, I have felt I was going mad? Not from the sea, but from the people. All my gains are slipping away, with the people round me. A lot of the things which you and Jenny say, even, seem to me to be needless: strange noises: empty. You know what I mean, 'How are you?' - 'Do sit down.' - 'What nice weather we are having!' What does it matter? People talk far too much. Where I have been, and where Galahad is, it is a waste of time to have 'manners.' Manners are only needed between people, to keep their empty affairs in working order. Manners makyth man, you know, not God. So you can understand how Galahad may have seemed inhuman, and mannerless, and so on, to the people who were buzzing and clacking about him. He was far away in his spirit, living on desert islands, in silence, with eternity. ~ T.H. White

'Spectrum' is in part a disco song. But we play it hard, and it's a real euphoric, wailing tune. It's kind of like a total house anthem, in a way, but it seems to be going down really well. We've got all the grunge kids going mad for disco house raves. ~ Florence Welch

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

I loved men and was going mad with suppressed desire. It pushed me into a series of affairs with dubious jazz musicians. Sex was not what I imagined. It was tension, scent and prosaic misalliance. It was sweet and sad revelation, and all expectation dashed. ~ James Ellroy

While everybody else was going mad, we were actually the sanest people in the whole thing. ~ George Harrison

away from fast food - for three weeks already. And I was starting to miss the occasional burger and fries. I assumed there'd be a few of the other lads feeling the same way. I talked to Sven, who thought it wouldn't do any harm, and then had a word with the England chefs. On the Wednesday night we all trooped down to dinner. The doors of the dining room were shut and there were two giant golden arches stuck up on them. We all went inside and there was a McDonald's takeaway mountain waiting for us: more burgers, cheeseburgers and chips than you've ever seen piled up in one room in your life. It was a complete surprise to all the players. We just devoured everything: it was like watching kids going mad in a candy store. And it worked. We did it again before we played Denmark. Maybe fast food was what was missing from our preparations for facing Brazil. ~ David Beckham

He wanted to dismiss Saint Rosaline's comments out of hand, but this was impossible because he knew that the comments came from the recesses of this own mink. Either that, or he was truly going mad, which at this point seemed like an attractive option. ~ Suzanne Harper

I simply don't understand. I have not the remotest clue what the nature or extent of my neighbor's woes can be. Practical troubles, griefs that can be assuaged if only there is enough to eat - these may be the most intense of all burning hells, horrible enough to blast to smithereens my ten misfortunes, but that is precisely what I don't understand: if my neighbors manage to survive without killing themselves, without going mad, maintaining an interest in political parties, not yielding to despair, resolutely pursuing the fight for existence, can their griefs really be genuine? Am I wrong in thinking that these people have become such complete egoists and are so convinced of the normality of their way of life that they have never once doubted themselves? ~ Osamu Dazai

To what exactly had I felt entitled with Bill? There is an answer: Joy. Not happiness, which by that time seemed a fantasy one had to agree to give up in order to keep from going mad. By forty, is there anyone who hasn't had to recognize that happiness, as understood by youth, is illusory? That the best one can hope for is an absence of too many tragedies and that the road through the inevitable grief be, if not smooth, then steady? Daily life was a pale gray thing, it seemed, and to expect otherwise was to be a fool - at best. ~ Robin Black

Right now, with that lock of hair falling in his eyes, he's the brother I've missed, the one who once brought me stones from the sea, told me they were rajah's jewels. I want to tell him that I'm afraid I'm going mad by degrees and that nothing seems entirely real to me anymore. I want to tell him about the vision, have him pat me on the head in that irritating way and dismiss it with a perfectly logical doctor's explaination. I want to ask him if it's possible that a girl can be born unlovable, or does she just become that way? I want to tell him everything and have him understand. ~ Libba Bray

It's alright" said a dreamy voice from beside Harry as Ron vanished into the coach's dark interior. "You're not going mad or anything. I can see them too."
"Can you?" said Harry desperately, turning to Luna. He could see the bat-winged horses reflected in her wide, silvery eyes.
"Oh yes," said Luna, "I've been able to see them since my first year here. They've always pulled the carriages. Don't worry. You're just as sane as I am."
Smiling faintly, she climbed into the musty interior of the carriage after Ron. Not altogether reassured, Harry followed her. ~ J.K. Rowling

This is the story of a girl gone mad while trying to find a little bit of love. ~ Charlotte Eriksson

Marriage is a paradox second only to life itself. That at the age of twenty or so, with little knowledge of each other and a dangerous overdose of self-confidence, two human beings should undertake to commit themselves for life – and that church and state should receive their vows with a straight face – all this is absurd indeed. And it is tolerable only if it is reveled in as such. A pox on all the neat little explanations as to why it is reasonable that two teenagers should be bound to each other until death. It is not reasonable. It happens to be true to life, but it remains absurd. Down with the books that moralize reasonably on the subject of why divorce is wrong. Divorce is not a wrong; it is a metaphysical impossibility. It is an attempt to do something about life rather than with it - to work out the square root of –I rather than to use it.
Up with the absurdity of marriage then. Let the peasant rejoice. He is a very odd ball on a very odd pool table, and his marriage is one of the few things left to him that will roll properly in this game. And up with the marriage service. Let the peasant go back and read it while he rejoices - preferably in the old unbowdlerized version still used by the Church of England. It is full of death and cast iron. And it is one of the great remaining sanity markers. The world is going mad because it has too many reasonable options, and not enough interest or nerve to choose anything for good. In such a world, the marriage service is ~ Robert Farrar Capon

You never count your chickens before they hatch. I used to keep parakeets and I never counted every egg thinking I would get all eight birds. You just hoped they came out of the nest box looking all right. I'm like a swan at the moment. I look fine on top of the water but under the water my little legs are going mad. ~ Ian Holloway

It is fun to see girls going mad about me or dancing around to get one glimpse of me. These are major perks of being an actor. But you need to be cautious and respectful. ~ Emraan Hashmi

How clear the realization one is going mad
the mind has a silence, nothing happens in the physique, urine gathers in your loins, your ribs contract. ~ Jack Kerouac

It's a scarf," said Horace. "Miss P was able to smuggle me a pair of needles, and I knitted it while I was in my cell. I reckon that making it kept me from going mad in there." I thanked him and unfolded it. The scarf was simple and gray with knotted tassels on the ends, but it was well made and even had my initials monogrammed in one corner. JP. ~ Ransom Riggs

He didn't go down to dinner at all that night, didn't eat, didn't drink, simply thought of his wife, trying to decide what to do with her. He'd wanted her to suffer, and she'd suffered. He'd wanted her to pay for her deceits, and she'd saved his life. He'd wanted to torment her with the knowledge that she would never see him again and had instead created his own private hell. He wanted her to come to him again, giving herself to him as she had that night before her attempted escape, and he wanted to hear words she would never speak. He'd even started lying to himself as he lay sleepless in his bed, reliving each moment of their last night together, telling himself it was real, that she'd meant every word. He was going mad. ~ Elizabeth Elliott

Life's a jumble of farce and melodrama, the chaotic scribbling of a third-rate penny-a-liner. We mock it to keep from going mad--or at least to display our good taste. ~ Gary Inbinder

I write plays not to make money, but to stop myself from going mad. Because it's my way of making the world rational to me. ~ Edward Bond

Elaine and I got married in summer 1979, we went on our honeymoon and came back for the premiere of 'Scum.' All of sudden my face was on billboards in Leicester Square and people were crowding outside the cinema, going mad about the film. It was a complete shock. ~ Ray Winstone

Whatever Arys had been up to recently, it wasn't any saner than what I'd been doing. He was losing it, and I was willing to bet he didn't even realize it. At least I knew I was going mad. ~ Trina M. Lee

My soul will dance with Athena's soul; I'll be with her while I sleep; I'll wake up sweating and go into the kitchen for a glass of water. I'll understand that in order to combat ghosts you must use weapons that form no part of reality. Then, following the advice of my grandmother, I'll place an open pair of scissors on my bedside table to snip off the end of the dream. The next day, I'll look at the scissors with a touch of regret, but I must adapt to living in the world again or risk going mad. ~ Paulo Coelho

I wonder at how many of us, feeling unsafe and unprotected, either end up running far away from everything we know and love, or staying and simply going mad. I have decided today that neither option is more or less noble than the other. They are merely different ways of coping, and we each must cope as best we can. ~ Shani Mootoo

I'll be back before I have to meet the Headmaster about me going mad and killing people on my birthday, I swear. ~ Caitlin Kittredge

She's smokin' hearts with a burnin' flame
She's got a wild side without a name
And when she's riled it's a cryin' shame
Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! I've got it bad
Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! I'm going' mad

Cause in your head you've got it right
Won't go to bed without a fight
You think you're wise, you think it shows
So show me wise without those clothes

Isaac raised an eyebrow at me, but I couldn't even shrug. I was frozen. My heart had stopped. Everything had stopped.

She's playin' hardball and it's nothin' new
Short skirts so enjoy the view
She's a coldblooded tease baby through and through
Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! I've got it bad
Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! I'm goin' mad

Cause in your head you've got it right
Won't go to bed without a fight
You think you're wise you think it shows
So show me wise without those clothes

Come on Legs don't go to waste
I could be your only savin' grace"

"Put those morals on the back burner
Something tells me you're a fast fast learner

As I listened to the chorus taunt me over and over again until the song came to a climatic end, I somehow remembered to breathe. ~ Kelly Oram

No. It's bad for me. Cole Porter wrote the words and the music. This knowledge that you're going mad for me. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

The world is going mad at an accelerating rate and television is the Typhoid Mary of this madness. ~ Edward Robb Ellis

I haven't used my glamour since I was twelve years old," she whispered, gaze piercing as if it were very important to her that Scarlet understand this. "Not since I was old enough to control it. That's why the visions come to me. That's why I'm going mad. ~ Marissa Meyer

Going mad is the beginning of a process. It is not supposed to be the end result. ~ Jeanette Winterson

People talk to pets and babies to stop themselves going mad. ~ James Smythe

But there is an unbounded pleasure to be had in the possession of a young, newly blossoming soul! It is like a flower, from which the best aroma evaporates when meeting the first ray of the sun; you must pluck it at that minute, breathing it in until you're satisfied, and then throw it onto the road: perhaps someone will pick it up! I feel this insatiable greed, which swallows everything it meets on its way. I look at the suffering and joy of others only in their relation to me, as though it is food that supports the strength of my soul. I myself am not capable of going mad under the influence of passion. My ambition is stifled by circumstances, but it has manifested itself in another way, for ambition is nothing other than a thirst for power, and my best pleasure is to subject everyone around me to my will, to arouse feelings of love, devotion and fear of me - is this not the first sign and the greatest triumph of power? Being someone's reason for suffering while not being in any position to claim the right - isn't this the sweetest nourishment for our pride? And what is happiness? Sated pride. If I considered myself to be better, more powerful than everyone in the world, I would be happy. If everyone loved me, I would find endless sources of love within myself. Evil spawns evil. The first experience of torture gives an understanding of the pleasure in tormenting others. An evil idea cannot enter a person's head without his wanting to bring it into reality: ideas are organic ~ Mikhail Lermontov

Tool wondered if the girl was going mad. It happened to people. Sometimes they saw too much and their minds went away. They lost the will to survive. They curled up and surrendered to madness. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

It's like if every single male artist dressed up as farmers. In every video they were on a farm. Whether it was Jason Derulo or Oasis, they're always on a tractor, they're always surrounded by sheep and always in boots. And all the songs are about enjoying farming, and this is all you've had for 10 years - you'd think you were going mad. ~ Caitlin Moran

There's a man with a mullet going mad with a mallet in Millett's ~ Half Man Half Biscuit

Poet is Priest
Money has reckoned the soul of America
Congress broken thru to the precipice of Eternity
the president built a War machine which will vomit and rear Russia out of Kansas
The American Century betrayed by a mad Senate which no longer sleeps with its wife.
Franco has murdered Lorca the fairy son of Whitman
just as Maykovsky committed suicide to avoid Russia
Hart Crane distinguished Platonist committed suicide to cave in the wrong America
just as millions of tons of human wheat were burned in secret caverns under the White House
while India starved and screamed and ate mad dogs full of rain
and mountains of eggs were reduced to white powder in the halls of Congress
no godfearing man will walk there again because of the stink of the rotten eggs of America
and the Indians of Chiapas continue to gnaw their vitaminless tortillas
aborigines of Australia perhaps gibber in the eggless wilderness
and I rarely have an egg for breakfast tho my work requires infinite eggs to come to birth in Eternity
eggs should be eaten or given to their mothers
and the grief of the countless chickens of America is expressed in the screaming of her comedians over the radio ~ Allen Ginsberg

Many of the prophets of Jesus's time were thought to just be mad men, just sort of crazy people who were claiming to channel the divine. Perhaps that means we should be a little less judgmental of some of our own crazies talking about God on the corner. They might actually have found a pretty comfortable place in Jesus's time. ~ Reza Aslan

Mind is basically the beginning of madness. And if you are too much in it, it will drive you mad.

Mind has no certainity about anything. If you are betweeen two polarities of the mind,in a limbo--always to do or not to do,you will go crazy. You are crazy! Before it happens,jump out and have a look from outside at the mind.

Mind is basically indecisive and awareness is basically decisive.So any act of awareness is total,full without repentance. ~ Osho

I have read and re-read the Arusha Declaration and found nothing wrong with it except perhaps replacing a few commas here and there ... it was clear for some of us that it would only be a mad man who would stand up and defend the Arusha Declaration. ~ Julius Nyerere

My characters' addictions are what makes them a bit stylized or "grotesque" - not just in appearance but through what drives them. Addiction is what threatens stability and normalcy and yet it seems very much a part of being human - at least we are all a bit obsessive and compulsive. Aren't all humans driven by mad desires for one thing or another? ~ Porochista Khakpour

Oh, we're all mad around here, Ed! - Clarabelle ~ Derek Landy

The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.
There is joy and also pain
but the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.
Pretty-plain, loony-sane
The ways of the world all will change and all the ways remain the same
but if you're mad or only sane
the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.
We walk in love but fly in chains
And the planes in Spain fall mainly in the rain. ~ Stephen King

A beautiful woman is a picture which drives all beholders nobly mad. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

His father is out cutting wood, so he goes to his mother.

'Mother, I must away and see the world, or I shall go mad.'

Says his mother, 'If you must go, go you must, and God go with you! I will bake you a cake. Will you have a little cake with my blessing, or a big cake with my cursing?'

Says Jack, 'Make me a big cake, mother. It will last longer.'

His mother makes him a big cake, and he sets out. And she is standing on the roof of the house, calling curses after him as far as she can see him. ~ Ruth Manning-Sanders

It's about your mom."
"She's not mad at your again, is she?"
"No." I set the drill aside. ""In fact, I wanted to ask you for your permission to court your mom."
"You're taking her to court? ~ Lisa Kessler

Men first feel necessity, then look for utility, next attend to comfort, still later amuse themselves with pleasure, thence grow dissolute in luxury, and finally go mad and waste their substance. ~ Giambattista Vico

What sort of people live about here?
- In THAT direction lives, lives a Hatter and in THAT direction, lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they're both mad.
- But I don't want to go among mad people.
- Oh, you can't help that, we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.
- How do you know I'm mad?
- You must be, or you wouldn't have come here. ~ Lewis Carroll

I had no time to make a world of my own: I had to stay fixed like Atlas, my feet on the elephant's back and the elephant on the tortoise's back. To inquire on what the tortoise stood would be to go mad. ~ Henry Miller

Not completely, but neither of us gets mad when the other doesn't text back or call. Life's super-busy. Obviously you know what they're doing, and you trust them. We're so young that it would almost be like if we lived in the same city, what would happen? We'd be living together. At least this way he's in the same boat as I am: We can go out and have our own lives and know that we have each other. ~ Jennifer Lawrence

They have nothing to give. They have no power of making. All their power is to darken and destroy. They cannot leave this place; they are this place; and it should be left to them. They should not be denied nor forgotten, but neither should they be worshiped. The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows. The mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in men's eyes. And where men worship these things and abase themselves before them, there evil breeds; there places are made in the world where darkness gathers, places given over wholly to the Ones whom we call Nameless, the ancient and holy Powers of the Earth before the Light, the powers of the dark, of ruin, of madness… I think they drove your priestess Kossil mad a long time ago; I think she has prowled these caverns as she prowls the labyrinth of her own self, and now she cannot see the daylight any more. She tells you that the Nameless Ones are dead; only a lost soul, lost to truth, could believe that. They exist. But they are not your Masters. They never were. You are free, Tenar. You were taught to be a slave, but you have broken free. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

CHORUS: Helen! wild mad Helen
you murdered so many beneath Troy.
Now you've crowned yourself one final perfect time,
a crown of blood that will not wash away.
Strife walks with you everywhere you go.
KLYTAIMESTRA: Oh, stop whining.
And why get angry at Helen?
As if she singlehandedly destroyed those multitudes of men.
As if she all alone made this wound in us ~ Anne Carson

If the character is getting mad, getting upset or getting turned on, you're getting to see that in the facial tones and the skin tones. That's what I enjoy about acting. It can be very subtle, like that. ~ Michael Rooker

You have to be very strong to live close to God or a mountain, or you'll turn a little mad. ~ Rumer Godden

Women fuck us up, break our hearts, drive us mad, and yet we love them; because if we didn't, nothing would make sense. ~ Ahmed Mostafa

And you, Uhtred of Bebbanburg, Uhtred of Nothing, will die last and die slowest because you have betrayed the gods. You are cursed. You are all cursed!" She cackled then, a mad sound, before pointing the blade at me again. "The gods hate you, Uhtred! You were their son, you were their favourite, you were loved by them, but you chose to use your gifts for the false god, for the filthy Christian god, and now the real gods hate you and curse you! I speak to the gods, they listen to me, they will give you to me and I will kill you so slowly that your death will last till Ragnarok! ~ Bernard Cornwell

The young man who stood there was the handsomest mad Rand had ever seen, almost too handsome for masculinity. ~ Robert Jordan

My feelings have changed about ballroom dancing because when I am mad I can dance to blow some steam off. Dancing is fun because you can dance to tunes like 'Hit the Road Jack'. ~ David

I really have a secret satisfaction in being considered rather mad. ~ W. Heath Robinson

He was always just mad enough to take treaties seriously. Honor, you know. I don't have any. ~ Orson Scott Card

I picked up an old microscope at a flea market in Verona. In the long evenings, in my imitation of life science, I set up in the courtyard and examined local specimens. Pointless pleasure, stripped of ends. The ancient contadino from across the road, long since convinced that we were mad, could not resist coming over for a look.
I showed him where to put his eye. I watched him, thinking, this is how we attach to existence. We look through awareness's tube and see the swarm at the end of the scope, taking what we come upon there for the full field of sight itself.
The old man lifted his eye from the microscope lens, crying.
Signore, ho ottantotto anni e non ho mai Saputo prima che cosa ci fosse in una goccia d'acqua. I'm eighty-eight years old and I never knew what was in a droplet of water. ~ Richard Powers

Empires are born. Empires reach their peak. Empires die. Death is never pretty. (...) Is it that the good die young, or is it simply that the old turn bad and mad? ~ Kieron Gillen

A strange thing surely that my Heart, when love had come unsought
Upon the Norman upland or in that poplar shade,
Should find no burden but itself and yet should be worn out.
It could not bear that burden and therefore it went mad. ~ William Butler Yeats

If I win, I'm a prodigy. If I lose then I'm mad. That's the way history is written ~ Eoin Colfer

We men of intelligence will learn to harness the insanities of reason. We can't leave the world any longer to the direction of chance. We can't allow dangerous maniacs like Luther, mad about dogma, like Napoleon, mad about himself, to go on casually appearing and turning everything upside down. In the past it didn't so much matter; but our modern machine is too delicate. A few more knocks like the Great War, another Luther or two, and the whole concern will go to pieces. In future, the men of reason must see that the madness of the world's maniacs is canalised into proper channels, is made to do useful work, like a mountain torrent driving a dynamo ... ~ Aldous Huxley

The Spartan statesman Lycurgus, seven hundred years ago, is said to have observed: When falls on man the anger of the gods, First from his mind they banish understanding. Such was to be the fate of Caesar. I am sure Cicero was correct: he had gone mad. His success had made him vain, and his vanity had devoured his reason. ~ Robert Harris

I sold my house this week. I got a pretty good price for it, but it made my landlord mad as hell ~ Garry Shandling

They wouldn't know mad when they saw it in any case, because a good portion of the women in the Asylum were no madder than the Queen of England. Many were sane enough when sober, as their madness came out of a bottle, which is a kind I knew very well. One of them was in there to get away from her husband, who beat her black and blue, he was the mad one but nobody would lock him up; ~ Margaret Atwood

Some people are so broken they get mad at you for being whole. ~ ANA

Well, I guess we're off, like a herd of mad turtles as my dad used to say. ~ Margaret Weis

Desert this mad and unfounded obsession with the so-called truth. In pursuit of truth, you are guaranteed a long and perilous run through a semantic maze that derives meaning only from your undivided attention. ~ Tom Fahy

For a long time, I was mad at you. The way you cut me out of everything hurt me, and so I kept what I knew to myself. But then even after I wasn't mad anymore, I still didn't say anything, and I don't even really know why. ~ John Green