insanity

But in Ward 9 the air had a real quality, it clamped itself over your face like a pad of cotton wool, soaked through with the sweet chloroform of utter sadness. - Ward 9

We're authors. We're more than a little unstable.

This madman must be stopped.

A part of me expects more of my only sister....Dorothy has always been exactly who she is, and for me to hope for anything better reminds me of a quote attributed to Einstein: Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Dorothy is predictable. She does the same thing repeatedly and expects not a different result but the same one she got the last time she did whatever she wants with little regard for anyone else. So maybe she's the sane one....

Was it possible that perhaps the most plausible explanation was being offered by someone who anyone with an ounce of sanity would have long ago consigned to the realm of the insane?

What a thing it is to have music that plays your terrible thoughts. I imagined that one piece could drive more delicate women than myself to insanity.

I wondered whether I had gone insane. If so, I thought, then this is what it feels like; I would never have guessed the world would still appear so sharp and vivid, the streets the same, the clouds the same, nothing different except your mind has come unhinged, its cogs whirling loose and wild and hazardous.

And I realize the unbearable anguish of insanity: how uninformed people can be thinking insane people are "happy," O God, in fact it was Irwin Garden once warned me not to think the madhouses are full of "happy nuts." (p. 200)

Insanity is nothing more than ordinary.

Addy, living one day without you would never be for the best. I want you every minute of every day. Forever. I love you.

People who were perfectly sane on Tuesday sometimes go nuts on Wednesday.

She disappeared; her voice, her laughter and the warmth of her breath never seen by no one again.

[n regard to Jesus believing himself inspired]This belief carried no more personal imputation than the belief of Socrates that he was under the care and admonition of a guardian demon. And how many of our wisest men still believe in the reality of these inspirations while perfectly sane on all other subjects (Works, Vol. iv, p. 327).

The ordinary lunatic is generally a harmless, isolated case; since everyone sees that something is wrong with him, he is quickly taken care of. But the unconscious infections of groups of so-called normal people are more subtle and far more dangerous.

Fear brings your mind to the edge of insanity, where everything is so frighteningly crystal clear you can take in every little thing that__ happening around you. Your body runs purely on adrenaline, with not a drop of blood pumping through your veins.

Burnout_occurs because we__e trying to solve the same problem over and over.

At night I locked my bedroom door, because [my father] could not sleep and would insist on talking to me, endlessly, without making sense. But there was a small window over the door which could not be locked. One night I woke up to see him slithering through the tiny aperture and jumping nimbly to the floor. But he paid no attention to me. He aimlessly picked up various pieces of heavy mahogany furniture and let them drop with seemingly little effort. In his insanity he had become superhumanly agile and powerful. Staying with him was a nightmare.

It's true,' replied Doris with a sniff in Bessy's direction to make her sensible of a victory, even if a minor one. 'It is amazing how so many people go insane. One day a man is a normal, friendly husband and the next he suddenly becomes a raging schizoid and slays his wife and himself as well. The result of what cause? Why, perhaps he chanced to find some schoolgirl treasure of another beau who had been his greatest rival and is stunned to discover that she secretly retains this. But usually the matter is not so simple, you know. Next to nothing may happen, jarring awake some sleeping monstrosity in a man's complex mental machinery and turning him from a sane person to a mentally sick individual. It is wholly impossible to say when a man is sane, for' -she tittered- 'scarce one of us is normal.''You mean - it might happen to any of us?''Of course,' said Doris, charmed by all this interest. 'One moment we are seated here, behaving normally and the next some tiny thing, a certain voice, a certain combination of thoughts may throw out the balance wheel of our intellects and we become potential inmates for asylums the rest of our lives. No, not one of us knows when the world will cease to be a normal, ordinary place. You know, no one ever knows when he goes insane: He supposes it is the world altering, not himself. Rooms become peopled with strange shapes and beings, sounds distort themselves into awful cries and, poof! we are judged insane.''Poof -' said Jacob, feeling weak and ill.("He Didn't Like Cats")