Allan Gurganus Quotes

I don't think any collector knows his true motivation.

When I get into collecting things, I get a little obsessive. Which is why when I start buying comics, I buy way too many, and I have to stop myself.

The desert is a capricious lady, and sometimes she drives men crazy.

To feel our character, our personality, and our personal, hard-won history fade from being is to be exposed to whatever lies beneath these comforting, operational conveniences. What remains when the conscious and functioning self has been erased is mankind's fundamental condition – irrational, violent, guilt-wracked, despairing, and mad.

Love is horrible. I mean, when you're in love, it's like a sickness. Such madness.

On my fortieth birthday, rather than merely bore my friends by having anything as mundane as a midlife crisis I decided it might be more interesting to actually terrify them by going completely mad and declaring myself to be a magician.

Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form.

I don't want to be a celebrity because that sucks. It's just madness.

Hamlet: Lady, shall I lie in your lap? Ophelia: No, my lord. Hamlet: DId you think I meant country matters? Ophelia: I think nothing, my lord. Hamlet: That's a fair thought to lie between maids' legs. Ophelia: What is, my lord? Hamlet: Nothing.

Get away from all books and forms and let your soul see its Self. "We are deluded and maddened by books", Shri Krishna declares.

I'm the one who steps from the shadows, all trenchcoat and cigarette and arrogance, ready to deal with the madness. Oh, I've got it all sewn up. I can save you. If it takes the last drop of your blood, I'll drive your demons away. I'll kick them in the bollocks and spit on them when they're down and then I'll be gone back into darkness, leaving only a nod and a wink and a wisecrack. I walk my path alone... who would walk with me?

In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.

All mountain streets have streams to thread them, or deep grooves where a stream might run. You would do well to avoid that range uncomforted by singing floods. You will find it forsaken of most things but beauty and madness and death and God.

Weakness ever sympathizes with vice, because vice is a weakness which assumes the mask of strength. Madness holds reason in horror, and on all subjects it delights in the exaggerations of falsehood. The cause of all bewitchments, the poison of all philtres, the power of all sorcerers are there.

Everyone's crazy anyway. And those who think they aren't, are the ones who are even crazier - because they're in denial.

The truth of life lies in the impulsiveness of matter. The mind of man has been poisoned by concepts. Do not ask him to be content, ask him only to be calm, to believe that he has found his place. But only the madman is really calm.

I like everyone who tries to show that madness is, in large part, conditioned by society and particularly by the family, and therefore, strongly affects women.

And too much informayshun can drive a man mad. Too much informayshun becomes just Noise. And it never, never stops.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane. (I think I made you up inside my head.)

You are guilty of no evil, Ransom of Thulcandra, except a little fearfulness. For that, the journey you go on is your pain, and perhaps your cure: for you must be either mad or brave before it is ended.

The wisest among us is very lucky never to have met the woman, be she beautiful or ugly, intelligent or stupid, who could drive him crazy enough to be fit to be put into an asylum.

A man who is 100% sane is dead.

The people designing the weapons literally often didn't know how they were being handled in the field by the Air Force - and a lot of people in the Air Force didn't understand some of the dangers. There's a very strong element of madness in this.

Dispute not with her: she is lunatic.