Lunacy Quotes

“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

“Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the Earth goes round the Sun; today, to believe the past is inalterable. He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Calling it lunacy makes it easier to explain away the things we don't understand.”
― Megan Chance, The Spiritualist

“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.”
― C.G. Jung, The Integration of the Personality

“His soft lips glide across my jaw. I’m dazzled by his touch, drugged by his promises, falling deeper and deeper into him. Before he reaches my mouth, I catch his hands and roll him off until he’s the one on his back, his wings no longer a hiding place but silky black pools along the ground.
I prop my top half over his so I’m in control. “I can’t think,” I whisper. “You’re making me crazy.”
“Insanity is the most pristine clarity.” He winds a leg around my hips and topples me onto him. “Let the lunacy in. Let it be your guide.” One corner of his mouth lifts to a boyish grin.”
― A.G. Howard, Ensnared

“Nothing can be more slightly defined than the line of demarcation between sanity and insanity ... Make the definition too narrow, it becomes meaningless; make it too wide, and the whole human race becomes involved in the dragnet. In strictness we are all mad when we give way to passion, to prejudice, to vice, to vanity; but if all the passionate, prejudiced and vain people were to be locked up as lunatics, who is to keep the key to the asylum?"

(Editorial, The Times, 22 July 1853)”
― Kate Summerscale, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective

“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, Human Detritus

“I swear that each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant - impossible socially, but full-scale - and that it's the knockings and baterrings we sometimes hear in each other that keeps our intercourse from utter banaility.”
― Elizabeth Bowen

“On War - At the end, the only real statement either side can use is "It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
― Marsha Hinds

“Being a lunatic isn’t so bad, but to be a lunatic AND be wrong would be bleak, man!”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“O moon that makes restless the hearts of men,
That lays an insane beam upon their mind,
And laughing makes men mad.

- Sunday Night: Truro”
― A.L. Rowse, Poems of Deliverance

“Honesty is not the same as truth. That is the obstacle of the notion of relative truths. I would like to put my trust in the lunatic. He is the one least concerned with what I think of him, the mark of an honest man. I can always depend on him to be completely honest in what he thinks and feels, about anything, no matter the consequences laid before him; however, with no course of rationale, I cannot necessarily take his word for even the well-being of him in his own reality.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“I always retained a stunning friendship with most of my amores, which made me feel like life was worth living. All the hours of lunacy and love had actually amounted to Something.”
― Pamela Des Barres, I'm with the Band: Confessions of a Groupie

“l lived the life of a lunatic, seeing sunshine, I suspected rain”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“Such sheer lunacy, this thing called love. Yet, they all want to dive and lose themselves in its deep waves.”
― Saim Cheeda

“The chicken lives as if in a dream. She has no sense of reality. All the chicken's fright comes because they're always interrupting her reverie. The chicken is a sound sleep. . . . The chicken has plenty of inner life. To be honest, the only thing the chicken really has is inner life. Our vision of her inner life is what we call "chicken.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Complete Stories

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

“In the Dictionary 'lumpy jaw' comes just before 'lunacy,' but in life there are no such clues. Suddenly, for no reason, you might start to dribble from the mouth, to howl peevishly at the moon. You might start quoting your mother, out loud and with conviction. You might lose your friends to the most uninspired of deaths. You might one day wake up and find yourself teaching at a community college; there will have been nothing to warn you. You might say things to your students like, There is only one valid theme in literature: Life will disappoint you.”
― Lorrie Moore, Anagrams

“On War – At the end, the only real statement either side can use is ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
― Marsha Hinds

“If everyone’s going to think of me as a lunatic then I may as well benefit from it. At least it’ll redeem me from being mediocre”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“The heightened sanity of science and the sheer lunacy of magic. It's in the area where they overlap that we both are able to find... ecstasy!”
― Matt Kindt, MIND MGMT, Volume Six: The Immortals

“For there is nothing more serious than a lunatic when he comes to the central point of his lunacy.”
― Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own

“On War – At the end, here is the only real statement either side can use: It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
― Marsha Hinds

“I am dead to the wild world's lunacy,
And now rest in a tranquil universe!
I live alone in my own holy ecstasy,
Within my rapture—within my Verse!”
― Friedrich Ruckert

“When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies?

In the days that followed, I wrote that passage everywhere-unconsciously, compulsively. I find it now in books I was reading, in my lecture notes, in the margins of my journal. Its recitation was a mantra. I willed myself to believe it-to believe there was no real difference between what I knew to be true and what I knew to be false. To convince myself that there was some dignity in what I planned to do, in surrendering my own perceptions of right and wrong, of reality, of sanity itself, to earn the love of my parents. For them I believed I could don armor and charge at giants, even if I saw only windmills.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“I'm not very well up on the lunacy laws of Scotland. Maybe they have changed since my father's incarceration. There is such distance now, in miles and time. It all seems to belong to another century. Which, of course, it does.

Do Scottish asylums still boast of their 'trout fishing' and, more worryingly, their 'good shooting'?”
― Ian Madden, With Their Best Clothes On

“The mystery around prophecy is intelligent prediction, chance and those which fulfill themselves.”
― Monaristw

“I wonder if this is what lunacy feels like. Wanting something so desperately even as you understand, intimately, the shape of its ending. And stupidly wanting it anyway.”
― Elizabeth May, The Wolf and the Crown of Blood

“As long as you can still suspect that you're going crazy, find hope in the suspecting itself: it means you have not yet arrived.”
― Criss Jami

“A curve of silver trembled on the edge of the world, rippling in the superheated air. As she stared it rose slowly but majestically. All sound seemed to dim. A bickering argument between her two elder sisters faded into a distant background. The glowing light expanded and shivered and danced before her enchanted gaze and she could not take her eyes off it. She felt dizzy, suddenly wondering what it would be like to fly, to reach out to that silver orb, to take it in hand, to dance with it among the stars. (Syren Moon - chapter 11)”
― Martyn X Brown, Early Works Volume Two