I hate to advocate drugs, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.
—Hunter S. Thompson
But you learn to smother the living breathing soul, go deaf to it, and this violence to the self is what is commonly called sanity in the places where I have lived.
—Philip Ó Ceallaigh
Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives.… I am liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it.
—John Lennon
There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more [combat] missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to.
—Joseph Heller
I always made a point of telling the doctors I was sane, and asking to be released, but the more I endeavored to assure them of my sanity, the more they doubted it.
—Nellie Bly (pen name of journalist Elizabeth Jane Cochran, who faked insanity to research a mental institution)
Being considered or labeled mentally disordered—abnormal, crazy, mad, psychotic, sick, it matters not what variant is used—is the most profoundly discrediting classification that can be imposed on a person today. Mental illness casts the "patient" out of our social order just as surely as heresy cast the "witch" out of medieval society. That, indeed, is the very purpose of stigma terms.
—Thomas Szasz
There are now electrical appliances with the main unit so sealed in that it cannot be got at for repair. There have always been human beings like that.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Things are always darkest just before they go pitch black.
—Kelly Robinson
A broken leg can be remembered and located: "It hurt right below my knee, it throbbed, I felt sick at my stomach." But mental pain is remembered the way dreams are remembered—in fragments, unbidden realizations, like looking into a well and seeing the dim reflection of your face in that instant before the water shatters.
—Tracy Thompson
When I dream, I am always ageless.
—Elizabeth Coatsworth
You know that there's a whole underground system that you call "dreams," having nothing better to call them, and that this system is not like roads or tunnels but more like a live body network, all coiling and stretching, unpredictable but finally familiar—where you are now, where you've always been.
—Alice Munro
I dream my painting, and then I paint my dream.
—Vincent Van Gogh
Dream is not a revelation. If a dream affords the dreamer some light on himself, it is not the person with closed eyes who makes the discovery but the person with open eyes, lucid enough to fit thoughts together. Dream—a scintillating mirage surrounded by shadows—is essentially poetry.
—Michel Leiris
Some colors exist in dreams that are not present in the waking spectrum.
—Terri Guillemets
A dream that is not interpreted is like a letter that is not read.
—Talmud