Lunacy 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 thought about how I had now let a self-proclaimed lunatic into my house twice and considered the possibility that my life needed sorting out. ~ Rasmenia Massoud

Norbert the Nutjob may have been a maniac, but lunacy and genius are very close together, and it had to be admitted, he was a great Dreamer.
Perhaps the inventor-madmen of the Future will dream its like again. ~ Cressida Cowell

I've long thought that Marco Rubio would make a strong G.O.P. candidate for president. While he was brought into office by surfing on the Tea Party wave, he has proven himself not to be wedded to the frequent lunacy of those folks. ~ Kurt Eichenwald

Fantasy. Lunacy.
All revolutions are, until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities. ~ David Mitchell

I've never seen such a collection of idiots in my whole life.' Doolittle shook his head. 'If you participate in this lunacy, y'all will get yourselves killed. Then don't come crying to me.'
Now that would be a neat trick. ~ Ilona Andrews

I was playing Rasputin and what was motivating him was crumpet really, and I was extremely keen on crumpet so I was really rather good as Rasputin. And my next catastrophic failure was Macbeth, who I played in the style of a crumpet-lover, and then when Doctor Who came along, I embraced this lunacy, this cloud-cuckoo-land where people had to be convinced by absolute nonsense. I came from a very religious background, so it was easy for me to believe in something I knew nothing about. ~ Tom Baker

Mad' sounds dashing, daring and admirable when you hold the tattered flag in the midst of battle and expired natives lie all over the carpet with holes in 'em that you put there. 'Mad' is less impressive written on a form by a commissioner of lunacy as you're turned over to the hospitallers of St Mary of Bedlam to be dunked in ice water because your latest 'scrape' was running starkers down Oxford Street while gibbering like a baboon. ~ Kim Newman

Theo's already on his way. Paul might bee too, but communications have been down so long, I don't know."
"Heading out here with a storm like this coming in? That's madness." Dad sighs. "Then again, jumping through dimensions to chase a dead man is madness too. I had long suspected their lunacy but this confirmation is nonetheless disquieting."
"See? Everything's going to be fine. ~ Claudia Gray

Another image comes to mind: Nietzsche leaving his hotel in Turin. Seeing a horse and a coachman beating it with a whip, Nietzsche went up to the horse and, before the coachman's very eyes, put his arms around the horse's neck and burst into tears.
That took place in 1889, when Nietzsche, too, had removed himself from the world of people. In other words, it was at the time when his mental illness had just erupted. But for that very reason I feel his gesture has broad implications: Nietzsche was trying to apologize to the horse of Descartes. His lunacy (that is, his final break with mankind) began at the very moment he burst into tears over the horse. ~ Milan Kundera

All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy. That's how far the world is from where I am. Just one bad day. ~ Alan Moore

It was the only field, so far, in which the Pearl of Fortune had shown any precocity, other than the feat of keeping her head, her reason and her sense of the ridiculous amid conditions of civilized lunacy. ~ Dorothy Dunnett

As long as people are going to call you lunatic anyway, why not get the benefit of it? It liberates you from convention. ~ Gregory Maguire

A woman can't be pure, and isn't supposed to be--how could she? It is against nature! And do you think God made her to be pure? Answer me! --No, and ten thousand times no. Then why this lunacy! Why fling us up to the stars with one hand, when you have to pull us down with the other! Can't you let us walk the earth by your side, one human being with another, and nothing more at all? It is impossible for us to step firmly on the prose of life when you blind us with your poetic will-o'-the-wisps. Let us alone! For God's sake, let us alone! ~ Jens Peter Jacobsen

What I am getting at is that there is a point at which efficiency crosses over into lunacy, and the savings in money or resources cease to be worthwhile in light of the price paid in other ways. ~ Mary Roach

Criminality was so widespread that its practitioners split into fields of specialization. Some became coney catchers, or swindlers (a coney was a rabbit reared for the table and thus unsuspectingly tame); others became foists (pickpockets), nips, or nippers (cutpurses), hookers (who snatched desirables through open windows with hooks), abtams (who feigned lunacy to provide a distraction), whipjacks, fingerers, cross biters, cozeners, courtesy men, and many more. Brawls were shockingly common. ~ Bill Bryson

Can you do this?" "So long as we don't get hit by a blast." He cut a meaningful glare to their pilot. "Hold it steady, Chay." "I make no promises and bear no liability for your lunacy, her clumsiness or any injury my unfortunate luck, uncharacteristic ineptitude or continual stupidity may cause." Nice legal disclosure. Rotten bastard. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

I pawned the remote to my misery,
trading it in for liquor that was cheap;
screwdrivers for my vitamin c,
and a little bloodstream to my IV,
helping to soothe my lunacy ~ Phil Volatile

In Gothic fiction, characters must contend with the dead, with active hauntings or with hallucinations of hauntings, as well as whatever other trying circumstances they might find themselves in: orphanhood, lunacy, imprisonment, inheritances that go astray, troubling romantic situations. The Gothic novel does not strive for subtlety, and it isn't to everyone's taste. It can seem adolescent, an immature version of the stately, measured, grown-up realist novel, except that the line between Gothic and the realist is never clear. A disdain for the Gothic is limiting, since this literature, in all its flagrancy, has something to say about emotional as well as physical death, and a tale of a haunting can have a narrative vitality that is far from conclusive. Gothic stories linger especially in the mind. ~ Brenda Walker

I do not believe the fable that men read travel books to escape from reality: they read to escape into it, from a crazy wonderland of armaments, cant, political speeches at once insincere and illiterate, propaganda, and social injustice which the lunacy of humanity has constructed over a period of years. ~ Alex Comfort

The few psychiatrists I respect always talk about people being mad. Use the short, simple, true words... "Mad" has the right sound to it. It's an ordinary word, a word which tells us how lunacy might come and call like a delivery van. ~ Julian Barnes

He lost himself somewhere on the harmless side of lunacy, slightly south of innocuous but definetly north of demented. ~ Tony Vigorito

MUSINGS
The little poets sing of little things:
Hope, cheer, and faith, small queens and puppet kings;
Lovers who kissed and then were made as one,
And modest flowers waving in the sun.
The mighty poets write in blood and tears
And agony that, flame-like, bites and sears.
They reach their mad blind hands into the night,
To plumb abysses dead to human sight;
To drag from gulfs where lunacy lies curled,
Mad, monstrous nightmare shapes to blast the world.
[click on the thumbnail by Jack "King" Kirby] ~ Robert E. Howard

It's not that I liked lunacy for the sake of lunacy, but if a writer can truly surprise me without throwing logic completely out the window, then that writer has me for good. Most book surprises aren't surprising at all but follow a formula, like the dead body that's certain to lurch out of a wreck being explored by deep-sea divers in just about every book that involves wrecks and divers. ~ Will Schwalbe

It must be nice to be righteous; from where I stand it looks like fucking lunacy. ~ Scott Lynch

Lunacy, like the rain, falls upon the evil and the good, and although it must forever remain a fearful misfortune, yet there may be no more sin or shame in it than there is in an ague fit or a fever. ~ Inmate Of The Glasgow Royal Asylum

Wall of lies?' Proust muttered. 'Is that the one that borders the orchard of obsession that contains the tree of lunacy? ~ Sophie Hannah

For me, we're all comfortable, we're all happy, hopefully, but at the same time something will happen and you have to kind of understand that phenomenon. You have to understand what's going on and I've always been fascinated by craziness and lunacy. ~ Richard Patrick

How do people know they are sane? Can a person be gripped by lunacy, only to be released a short time later, never to relive the episode again? ~ Dee Remy

You go to any MBA program, and you will be taught the theory of the firm, that the purpose of the firm is the maximization of return on invested capital. I always thought this was a kind of lunacy. ~ Peter Senge

The will of God or the lunacy of man - it seemed to him that you could take your choice, if you wanted a good enough reason for most things. Or, alternatively (and he thought of it as he contemplated the small orderliness of the cabin against the window background of such frantic natural scenery), the will of man and the lunacy of God. ~ James Hilton

[The militia experts] accuse antigoverment agitants of paranoia, yet they spin around and claim that militias speak in coded phrases, have underground bunkers, and are secretly conspiring to take over the world and enslave minorities. They say it`s lunacy that men at the pentagon can conspire, yet they`re certain that farmers out on the plain are plotting as we speak.

They depict the United Nations as weak und ineffectual, yet they portray raggedy-ass backwoodsmen as the world`s biggest organized military threat. ~ Jim Goad

With the breakdown of the medieval system, the gods of chaos, lunacy, and bad taste gained ascendancy. ~ John Kennedy Toole

But, as in his narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot of Ahab's broad madness had been left behind; so in that broad madness, not one jot of his great natural intellect had perished. That before living agent, now became the living instrument. If such a furious trope may stand, his special lunacy stormed his general sanity, and carried it, and turned all its concentred cannon upon its own mad mark; so that far from having lost his strength, Ahab, to that one end, did now possess a thousand fold more potency than ever he had sanely brought to bear upon any one reasonable object. ~ Herman Melville

If two people see a fairy appear, eat a starfish, and dive into the tile floor without so much as a splash, neither can accuse the other of lunacy. ~ Kaydeon K. Moore

Pseudoscience often relies on a witches' brew of scientific terms (e.g. "wavelength," "energy fields," "vibrations") half-baked into simplistic metaphors that do not correspond with testable reality. In some cases, pseudoscience simply relies on language that is deliberately vague and poorly defined to deceive. While outright lunacy is almost always easy to spot, the most dangerous of pseudoscientific meanderings are those filled with scientific terminology that, even for experts, can initially be daunting and impressive. Upon dissection, however, the terminology is invariably found to be misused, or used in a context far from accepted understanding. However convincing and artful, however much we may even wish the conclusions to be true, monuments built in such shifting sands cannot withstand the inevitable tests of time. ~ K. Lee Lerner

Mademoiselle De Lafontaine – in right of her father, who was a German, assumed to be psychological, metaphysical and something of a mystic – now declared that when the moon shone with a light so intense it was well known that it indicated a special spiritual activity. The effect of the full moon in such a state of brilliancy was manifold. It acted on dreams, it acted on lunacy, it acted on nervous people; it had marvelous physical influences connected with life. Mademoiselle related that here cousin, who was mate of a merchant ship, having taken a nap on deck on such a night, lying on his back, with his face full in the light of the moon, had wakened, after a dream of an old woman clawing him by the cheek, with his features horribly drawn to one side; and his countenance had never quite recovered its equilibrium. ~ J. Sheridan Le Fanu

Every handsome man had a flaw. It was just her luck that in William's case that flaw was lunacy. ~ Ilona Andrews

And you look weak as a kitten.' 'Do I?' Myrnin asked, and smiled slowly. It had a sharp edge of lunacy to it. He made a purring sound low in his throat. 'Do try to pet me, then. You can report back how sharp my claws might be, once your throat grows back.' 'Fool.' 'Narrow roundhead.' 'You thieving, insolent Taffy - ' 'Enough!' Claire shouted, ~ Rachel Caine

The Everything and Nothing of Money
The Legacy Letters
By Carew Papritz
Summer, and you are the first man and the first woman to kiss. The first to know the exacting, steeling pain of a broken heart. The first to know everything about the whole cascading universe of gods and stars and lunacy and tenderness. Thus you become the first man and woman to know love. And God help you, for you are now the first man and woman in the world. ~ Carew Papritz

All rising suns set, Archivist. [...] All revolutions are [fantacy, lunacy], until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities. [...] I was not genomed to alter history, [...] no revolutionary ever was. ~ David Mitchell

For there is nothing more serious than a lunatic when he comes to the central point of his lunacy. ~ Max Stirner

I've proved my point. I've demonstrated there's no difference between me and everyone else! All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy. That's how far the world is from where I am. Just one bad day. You had a bad day once, am I right? I know I am. I can tell. You had a bad day and everything changed. Why else would you dress up as a flying rat? You had a bad day, and it drove you as crazy as everybody else... Only you won't admit it! You have to keep pretending that life makes sense, that there's some point to all this struggling! God you make me want to puke. I mean, what is it with you? What made you what you are? Girlfriend killed by the mob, maybe? Brother carved up by some mugger? Something like that, I bet. Something like that... Something like that happened to me, you know. I... I'm not exactly sure what it was. Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another... If I'm going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice! Ha ha ha! But my point is... My point is, I went crazy. When I saw what a black, awful joke the world was, I went crazy as a coot! I admit it! Why can't you? I mean, you're not unintelligent! You must see the reality of the situation. Do you know how many times we've come close to world war three over a flock of geese on a computer screen? Do you know what triggered the last world war? An argument over how many telegraph poles Germany owed its war debt creditors! Telegraph poles! Ha ha ha ha HA! It's all a joke! Everyth ~ Alan Moore

Jamie Oliver's lunch is soup, half a papaya with lime, ciabatta with mozzarella and prosciutto. The dear boy is not sharing the same planet as the rest of us. Is this lunacy supposed to be a practical suggestion for a harassed housewife trying to drag her children off to school? ~ Terry Wogan

Older generations are living proof that younger generations can survive their lunacy. ~ Cullen Hightower

What had they done to Bogrov? What had they done to this sturdy sailor, to draw this childish whimpering from his throat? Had Arlova whimpered in the same way when she was dragged along the corridor? Rubashov sat up and leant his forehead against the wall behind which No. 402 slept; he was afraid he was going to be sick again. Up till now, he had never imagined Arlova's death in such detail. It had always been for him an abstract occurrence; it had left him with a feeling of strong uneasiness, but he had never doubted the logical rightness of his behaviour. Now, in the nausea which turned his stomach and drove the wet perspiration from his forehead, his past mode of thought seemed lunacy. The whimpering of Bogrov unbalanced the logical equation. Up till now Arlova had been a factor in this equation, a small factor compared to what was at stake. But the equation no longer stood. The vision of Arlova's legs in their high-heeled shoes trailing along the corridor upset the mathematical equilibrium. The unimportant factor had grown to the immeasurable, the absolute; Bogrov's whining, the inhuman sound of the voice which had called out his name, the hollow beat of the drumming, filled his ears; they smothered the thin voice of reason, covered it as the surf covers the gurgling of the drowning. ~ Arthur Koestler

As her skin sizzled under the delicious heat, she supposed she should've been giving serious thought to the lunacy of what she was doing playing with a vampire, who was, for all his charm, as lethal as a stiletto across the throat. But then again, most of her friends already thought she was half a nut short of a fruitcake. Why disappoint? ~ Nalini Singh

A sound theory of value demands something different. It demands that good should be original and evil a mere perversion; that good should be the tree and evil the ivy; that good should be able to see all round evil (as when sane men understand lunacy) while evil cannot retaliate in kind; that good should be able to exist on its own while evil requires the good on which it is parasitic in order to continue its parasitic existence. ~ C.S. Lewis

'O great and mighty Master Li, pray impart to me the Secret of Wisdom!' he bawled.
'Take a large bowl,' I said. 'Fill it with equal measures of fact, fantasy, history, mythology, science, superstition, logic, and lunacy. Darken the mixture with bitter tears, brighten it with howls of laughter, toss in three thousand years of civilization, bellow kan pei - which means "dry cup" - and drink to the dregs.'
Procopius stared at me. 'And I will be wise?' he asked.
'Better,' I said. 'You will be Chinese.' ~ Barry Hughart

Happy the youth who believes that his duty is to remake the world and bring it more in accord with virtue and justice, more in accord with his own heart. Woe to whoever commences his life without lunacy. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

Every age that has historical status is governed by aristocracies.Aristocracy with the meaning - the best are ruling.Peoples do never govern themselves. That lunacy was concocted by liberalism. Behind its people's sovereignty the slyest cheaters are hiding, who don't want to be recognized. ~ Joseph Goebbels

In a world of chemically induced sanity, a little lunacy confers immense advantages. ~ Iain Pears

We talk. Darlene worries aloud that her husband works with a lot of attractive young women; she herself is fourty. I tell her it´s not about age. "Little thing called character," I say, thinking, Accepting marital advice from me: the height of lunacy. ~ Suzanne Finnamore

It's all that's left,' Leon said in a suddenly weak voice. 'It's what is left of civilization. You take raw material and you transform it. That is civilization. Physical love is all raw meat. That's why everyone's so preoccupied with it now. I have been told by a colleague ten years older than myself--as if it were possible for anybody to be ten years older than I am--that salvation comes from staring at the pubic region of strangers, and freedom, from inducing in myself, by the use of a chemical, the kind of ecstatic lunacy in which I spent most of my adolescence, a condition I attribute solely to the strength of my body at that time and the conviction I had then that I would see socialism in the United States during my lifetime. Now that my bones are weak, my brain is stronger. I don't expect . . . anything. But I cannot bear the grotesque, lying piety of my own unhinged contemporaries. One man, a literary star'--and here he broke off, laughed once, choked and shook his head--'oh, yes, a star, told me he only regretted the pill had not yet been developed in his own youth. All those girls who might have been his! In this age of generalized cock, is this the whole revelation toward which my life has been directed? I would, in any case, prefer to contemplate the organ of a horse. It is handsomer, larger and more comic than anything my fellow man has to show. It is the age of baby shit, darling. Don't kid yourself. My privacy has been violated--what I've admired and thought abo ~ Paula Fox

In political affairs illusions are usually the product of a failure to appreciate change; but such failure-usually a necessary and perhaps salutary part of human affairs-becomes, when the change is very fast, not a stabilizing conservatism but a form of deception resembling lunacy. ~ Laurence Lafore

Newton's third life childrearing colin for every lunacy, there is an equal and opposite lunacy. - Edmond Kirsch ~ Dan Brown

Quantum physics is a bit of a passion of mine. It's extraordinary. There's a branch of mathematics that is based on lunacy, and that's wonderful. ~ Bob Hoskins

The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars. ~ Umberto Eco

Lunacy attracting lunacy. Then, of course, they encourage each other, I suppose, validate each other. ~ Brent Hayward

We yearn for a stranger to poke around in our heart. Such an irrational thing it is. Flutter once and lunacy behold. ~ H.S. Crow

Despite all the lunacy of the last century, all the absurdity of war and genocide, we believe that humans being are rational and are made to seek the truth. ~ Timothy Radcliffe

While such charges may strike the reasonable among us as the very definition of lunacy, there is a reason they were made, a logic to them that went unchallenged within the echo chamber that is the American conservative right. Simply put, within a politics of white resentment and victimology, Hitler-laced rants work. After all, Hitler was not just a fascist, but is understood to have been a racial fascist: one whose dictatorial and murderous schemes were directed at a distinctly racialized "other." So to make the black man atop the U.S. political system into Hitler is to plant the idea in white minds that he too will be a racial fascist. And if that is the case, the question quite obviously arises, which race will he be coming for? Should we be scared? They certainly hope so, and are counting on it. ~ Tim Wise

Suppose that we believe what we are taught ... destroying the environment and militarizing outer space are rational policies ... of institutional lunacy. ~ Noam Chomsky

It takes an obsessive streak that borders on lunacy to go rummaging around in the past as memoirists are wont to do, particularly a fragmented or incendiary past, in which facts are sparse and stories don't match up. I don't know if memoirists as children are lied to more often as kids or only grow up to resent it more, but it does seem we often come from the ranks of orphans or half-orphans-through-divorce, trying to heal schisms inside ourselves. Like everybody, I suppose, people we loved broke our hearts because only they had access to them, and we broke our own hearts later by following their footsteps and reenacting their mistakes. ~ Mary Karr

Oddity, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. What one person rejects as lunacy, another reveres as truth. ~ Philip Gulley

But the myth of power is, of course, a very powerful myth, and probably most people in this world more or less believe in it. It is a myth, which, if everybody believes in it, becomes to that extent self-validating. But it is still epistemological lunacy and leads inevitably to various sorts of disaster. ~ Gregory Bateson

I think I was enchanted
When first a sombre Girl -
I read that Foreign Lady** -
The Dark - felt beautiful -

And whether it was noon at night -
Or only Heaven - at Noon -
For very Lunacy of Light
I had not power to tell -

The Bees - became as Butterflies -
The Butterflies - as Swans -
Approached - and spurned the narrow Grass -
And just the meanest Tunes

That Nature murmured to herself
To keep herself in Cheer -
I took for Giants - practising
Titanic Opera -

The Days - to Mighty Metres stept -
The Homeliest - adorned
As if unto a Jubilee
'Twere suddenly confirmed -

I could not have defined the change -
Conversion of the Mind
Like Sanctifying in the Soul -
Is witnessed - not explained -

'Twas a Divine Insanity -
The Danger to be Sane
Should I again experience -
'Tis Antidote to turn -

To Tomes of solid Witchcraft -
Magicians be asleep -
But Magic - hath an Element
Like Deity - to keep - ~ Emily Dickinson

Contemplating leaving everything I had ever known of one ill-advised hour of passionate lunacy. ~ Jane Harvey-Berrick

The harder he tried to keep control, to keep the thoughts and emotions firmly buried, the more anarchical it all became, as if a lifetime of leashed passion had broken free and was coming for him with vengeance, as if he had only been spared the lunacy of love before because he had been destined to be brought down by this particular woman. ~ Evie Dunmore

I don't want to talk about today's market anymore because nobody can make sense of what the market is. It's all over the map. There's a bunch of lunatics out there throwing money away. I'm sick and tired of it. It's lunacy. Punch me in the head and tell me I'm stupid, but that's the way I feel. There's no sense to it anymore. ~ Kevin Lowe

One cannot know oneself, what one actually is except in relationship. Anger, jealousy, envy, lust - all such reactions exist only in one's relationship with people, with things, and with ideas. If there is no relationship at all, if there is complete isolation, one cannot know oneself. The mind can isolate itself, thinking that it is somebody, which is a state of lunacy, unbalance, and in that state it cannot know itself. It merely has ideas about itself, like the idealist who is isolating himself from the fact of what he is by pursuing what he should be. That is what most of us are doing. Because relationship is painful, we want to isolate ourselves from this pain, and in the isolating process we create the ideal of what we should be, which is imaginary, an invention of the mind. So we can know ourselves as we actually are, consciously as well as unconsciously, only in relationship, and that is fairly obvious. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Things had gone badly at Hell House, although not quite as horribly as the '31 investigation. At least this time there were survivors, if you wanted to call being reduced to catatonia and raving lunacy 'surviving'. ~ Nancy A. Collins

Lunacy is when you can't see the seams where they stitched the world together anymore. ~ Richard Bachman

The old face, crinkled and dented with canals running every which way, pushed and shoved up against itself for a while, till a big old smile busted out from beneath 'em all, and his grey eyes fairly glowed. It was the first time I ever saw him smile free. A true smile. It was like looking at the face of God. And I knowed then, for the first time, that him being the person to lead the colored to freedom weren't no lunacy. It was something he knowed true inside him. I saw it clear for the first time. I knowed then, too, that he knowed what I was - from the very first. ~ James McBride

I make no promises and bear no liability for your lunacy, her clumsiness or any injury my unfortunate luck, uncharacteristic ineptitude or continual stupidity may cause.
Chayden ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

When the fear of death leaves us, the destructive craving for life leaves us too. We can then restrict our desires and our demands to our natural requirements. The dreams of power and happiness and luxury and far-off places, which are used to create artificial wants, no longer entice us. They have become ludicrous. So we shall use only what we really need, and shall no longer be prepared to go along with the lunacy of extravagance and waste. We do not even need solemn appeals for saving and moderation; for life itself is glorious, and here joy in existence can be had for nothing. ~ Jurgen Moltmann

He chuckled and brought his face closer to mine, almost close enough that it was hard to focus on his features, the smell of his cologne from this close was something expensive and delicious. "Or you'll what, Kacea? Kick my ass like you did when we were kids? I dare you to try, sweetling. I'm not the chubby simpleton I was then." He dragged his thumb across my lower lip and his dark gaze followed it. "I've learned a lot of things since then. And I'd love to share them with you…" ~ Alain Reece & Kacea Meade (Lunacy, Ragnarok Legacy #1) ~ R.A. Sears

Every anxiety is a mild form of premonition, and from that point the shade deepens till we get the forebodings and hauntings that merge into lunacy. ~ Arthur Alfred Lynch

One boy had drawn a perfect isosceles triangle on every single page- meticulously, it was emphasized. Meticulously was a chilling touch: meticulousness, we knew, was just one step away from full-blown lunacy. ~ Margaret Atwood

Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. ~ George Orwell

Calling it lunacy makes it easier to explain away the things we don't understand. ~ Megan Chance

Avoidance of lunacy is an insufficient agenda.
-George Will on Ronald Reagan, 3-6-1987 ~ George F. Will

Why would our brains throw us into a temporary insanity? What's the evolutionary purpose for this whacked-out loss of control? To understand why fascination grasps us so irresistibly, keep in mind the illogic of flirtation, and the lunacy of love. Fascination, as we've seen, is a visceral and primal decision-making process, one that's largely involuntary. Fisher says that our brains are literally "built to fall in love" because it's in our evolutionary best interest not to think clearly during the two-year time period it takes to meet, court, and produce a child, or else we might come to our senses and avoid the inconvenience of child rearing altogether. ~ Sally Hogshead

Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking. It's nothing to brag about. And those who preach faith, and enable and elevate it are intellectual slaveholders, keeping mankind in a bondage to fantasy and nonsense that has spawned and justified so much lunacy and destruction. Religion is dangerous because it allows human beings who don't have all the answers to think that they do. ~ Bill Maher

We [of Thelema] are whole-hearted extroverts; the penalty of restricting oneself is anything from neurosis to down right lunacy; in particular, melancholia. ~ Aleister Crowley

Speaking of lunacy,' remarked Pyrgus later, 'are you in love with my sister?'
Oh, yes!' Henry said at once. ~ Herbie Brennan

The notion is that human beings are born, (as my Guru has explained many times,) with equivalent potential for both contraction and expansion. The ingredients of both darkness and light are equally present in all of us, and then it's up to the individual (or the family, or the society) to decide what will be brought forth - the virtues or the malevolence. The madness of this planet is largely a result of human being's difficulty in coming into virtuous balance with himself. Lunacy (both collective and individual) results. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

To explain the unknown by the known is a logical procedure; to explain the known by the unknown is a form of theological lunacy. ~ David Brooks

It was lunacy, this idea, that I could sleep myself into a new life. Preposterous. But there I was, approaching the depths of my journey ~ Ottessa Moshfegh

The Fever Bird

The fever bird sand out last night.
I could not sleep, try as I might.

My brain was split, my spirit raw.
I looked into the garden, saw

The shadow of the amaltas
Shake slightly on the moonlit grass

Unseen, the bird cried out its grief,
Its lunacy, without relief:

Three notes repeated closer, higher,
Soaring, then sinking down like fire

Only to breathe the night and soar,
As crazed, as desperate, as before.

I shivered in the midnight heat
And smelt the sweat that soaked my sheet.

And now tonight I hear again
The call that skewers though my brain,

The call, the brain-sick triple note--
A cone of pain stuck inits throat.

I am so tired I could weep.
Mad bird, for God's sake let me sleep

Why do you cry like one possessed?
When will you rest? When will you rest?

Why wait each night till all but I
Lie sleeping in the house, then cry?

Why do you scream into my ear
What no one else but I can hear? ~ Vikram Seth

Of lunacy,
Innumerous were the causes; humbled pride,
Ambition disappointed, riches lost,
And bodily disease, and sorrow, oft
By man inflicted on his brother man;
Sorrow, that, made the reason drunk, and yet
Left much untasted. So the cup was fill'd. ~ Robert Pollok

Let's face it - English is a crazy language. There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren't invented in England or French fries in France. Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet, are meat. We take English for granted. But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.

And why is it that writers write but fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham? If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn't the plural of booth beeth? One goose, 2 geese. So one moose, 2 meese? One index, 2 indices? Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend? If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it?

If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat? In what language do people recite at a play and play at a recital? Ship by truck and send cargo by ship? Have noses that run and feet that smell? How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites?

You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your house can burn up as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out and in which an alarm goes off by going on. English was invented by people, not computers, and it reflects ~ Richard Lederer

Anger is a brief lunacy. ~ Horace

Displaced by darkness, you lie flat on your back, putting the world behind you, and stare at the moon, the embarrassing moon, with nothing to offer it, no ebb or flow, no wolfish transformations except this lunacy you keep to yourself ~ David Wagoner

Where there is no bitterness there is serenity.
Where there is no compassion there is cruelty.
Where there is no anger there is comaradie.
Where there is no wrath there is harmony.
Where there is no truth there is dishonesty.
Where there is no arrogance there is humility.
Where there is no faith there is apathy.
Where there is no hope there is misery.
Where there is no doubt there is certainty.
Where there is no understanding there is enmity.
Where there is no intelligence there is idiocy.
Where there is no sense there is lunacy.
Where there is no wisdom there is absurdity.
Where there is no sin there is liberty.
Where there is no God there is vanity.
Where there is no imagination there is reality.
Where there is no proof there is fantasy.
Where there is no limit there is infinity.
Where there is no time there is eternity.
Where there is no chance there is destiny. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

Beth summoned the courage to look straight into Hart's golden eyes. "Can you not consider that perhaps I fell in love with him?"
Deeply, dramatically, foolishly in love.
"No."
"Why not?"
art drew a breath but didn't speak. A muscle twitched in his jaw.
"I see," Beth said softly. "You believe he's mad, and you don't think any woman could love that."
"Ian is mad. The commission of lunacy proved it. I was there. I saw."
"Then why not leave him in the asylum if you think he's insane?"
"Because I know what they did to him." In the gentle twilight the powerful Duke of Kilmorgan looked suddenly haunted. "I saw what the damn quacks did. If he hadn't been mad when he went in, the place would have driven him so.".........Hart flicked his gaze away, but not before Beth saw the moisture in his eyes. .....
The breeze of the dying afternoon stirred his hair, tugged at the curls on Beth's forehead. She watched as one of the highest dukes in the land blinked away tears. ~ Jennifer Ashley

This book is dedicated to you.
Whether you are a Minion or a Skuttlebug or just, you know, a normal person, it's because of you that I get to do what I love and laughingly call it work.
I know some of you by name and some of you by sight (and some of you by smell, but let's not get into that) but there are still countless others I have never met, and to all of you I say thank you for your support, your passion, and your lunacy. ~ Derek Landy

They promised me that this would be my home. That girls like you would always be my sisters. But they weren't my sisters, were they? Catherine asked, but then the lunacy broke, a quick and fleeting crack, and through it I saw anger and bitterness and rage. ~ Ally Carter

Being a lunatic isn't so bad, but to be a lunatic AND be wrong would be bleak, man! ~ Karl Wiggins

It doesn't dawn on this depraved bourgeois world that this is positively a sin against all reason; that it is criminal lunacy to keep on drilling a born half-ape until people think they have made a lawyer out of him, while millions of members of the highest culture- race must remain in entirely unworthy positions; that it is a sin against the will of the Eternal Creator if His most gifted beings by the hundreds and hundreds of thousands are allowed to degenerate in the present proletarian morass, while Hottentots and Zulu Kaffirs are trained for intellectual professions. ~ Adolf Hitler