#madness

Was I ever crazy? Maybe. Or maybe life is… Crazy isn’t being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It’s you or me amplified. If you ever told a lie and enjoyed it. If you ever wished you could be a child forever. They were not perfect, but they were my friends. ↗

— Susanna Kaysen

#friendship #insanity #madness #friendship

We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter ↗

— Allen Ginsberg

#loyalty #madness #mental-illness #writing #friendship

Arthur felt happy. He was terribly pleased that the day was for once working out so much according to plan. Only twenty minutes ago he had decided he would go mad, and now here he was already chasing a Chesterfield sofa across the fields of prehistoric Earth. ↗

— Douglas Adams

#madness #sofa #life

When your efforts run in the face of conventional wisdom and accepted mastery, persistence can look like madness. If you succeed in the end, this extreme originality reformulates into a new level of mastery, sometimes even genius; if you fail in the end, you remain a madman in the eyes of others, and maybe even yourself. When you are in the midst of the journey…there’s really no way of knowing which one you are.” (p.129) ↗

— Hilary Austen

#conventional-wisdom #effort #extreme-originality #genius #journey

Pegging your contentment to the overall state of the world rather than of your own life: the basis of morality, or a sort of madness? ↗

— Alain de Botton

#life #madness #morality #world #life

Whatever happened next, good or bad, it would be wonderful finding out. ↗

— Kate Griffin

#adventure #kate-griffin #life #life

Unmoor the boat, we could go…downriver... History is a collection of found objects washed up through time. Goods, ideas, personalities surface towards us and then sink away and some we hook out and others we ignore. And as the pattern changes so does the meaning. We cannot rely on the facts. Time that returns everything, changes everything. ..a bundle of abandoned clothes. The end of one identity and the beginning of another. …History is a madman's museum. I think I understand some of this, But it’s all subject to the tide. Unmoor the boat. Part miracle part madness. My life is a series of set sails and shipwrecks. I run aground I cut loose, the rim is dangerously near the waterline. I feel like a saint in a coracle. Head thrown back, sun on my throat. Unmoor the boat. ↗

— Jeanette Winterson

#madness #unmoor #change

Love is merely a madness; and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punish'd and cured is that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too. ↗

— William Shakespeare

#love #madness #love

Love that is not madness is not love. ↗

— Pedro Calderón de la Barca

#madness #pedro-calderon-de-la-barca #love

I wish I could do whatever I liked behind the curtain of “madness”. Then: I’d arrange flowers, all day long, I’d paint; pain, love and tenderness, I would laugh as much as I feel like at the stupidity of others, and they would all say: “Poor thing, she’s crazy!” (Above all I would laugh at my own stupidity.) I would build my world which while I lived, would be in agreement with all the worlds. The day, or the hour, or the minute that I lived would be mine and everyone else’s - my madness would not be an escape from “reality”. ↗

— Frida Kahlo

#reality #love