Allison Janney Quotes

It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.

Frankly, goin' crazy was the best thing that ever happened to me. I don't say it's for everybody; some people couldn't cope.

When I was a child, I felt at times that I had been born into an insane asylum, that much of human life appeared to be an insane asylum. It was bewildering.

There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad.

Perhaps I'm absolutely bonkers and don't know it. Perhaps I'm psychotically mental.

It is not easy to distinguish reality from illusion, especially when one lives in a period of the great upheaval.

I did learn something about insanity while I was down there. People go crazy, not because they are crazy, but because it's the best available option at the time.

What's happened to me,' he thought. It was no dream.

Insanity - to have to construct a picture of one's life, by making inquiries of others.

This clarity made me able to behave normally, which posed some interesting questions. Was everybody seeing this stuff and acting as though they weren't? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act? If some people didn't see these things, what was the matter with them? Were they blind or something? These questions had me unsettled.

Insanity is arguing with reality.

In a crazy world, it's only your insanity that will keep you sane

What does it mean, to lose one's mind? Where does it go? If a man is out of his mind, where is he? What is insane when the world is mad by contrast?

Like the teens I worked with, I understood the need for miracles--they kept reality from paralyzing you

If on the other hand he went to pay his respects to The Door and it wasn't there . . . what then? The answer, of course, was very simple. He had a whole board of circuits for dealing with exactly this problem, in fact this was the very heart of his function. He would continue to believe in it whatever the facts turned out to be, what else was the meaning of Belief? The Door would still be there, even if the Door was not.

All humanity could share a common insanity and be immersed in a common illusion while living in a common chaos. That can't be disproved, but we have no choice but to follow our senses.

Am I dreaming? Has the world gone mad--or have I?

The world is this incredibly blurry, crazy dream that I'm just sort of stumbling through.

By clarity I don't mean that we're always in kind of a simple area where everything is clear and comforting and understood. Clarity is certainly a way toward disorientation because if you don't start out - if the reader isn't grounded, if the reader is disoriented in the beginning of the poem, then the reader can't be led astray or disoriented later.

Genius is a curse. That's how I look at it. Some think that the brilliant comprehend the universe in a way the rest of us can't. They see the world how it truly is—and that reality is so horrible the lose their minds. Clarity leads to insanity.

The only the way that you can live and function without seeing the facts in front of you is to put yourself in a constant state of denial.

I went through this difficult time [in the 1984] when we were making our third record where I kind of lost my mind. That's when the bulimia kicked in. And that's when I got really freaky.

It was daylight and I drove everyone home - I was driving a Mini with John and Cynthia and Pattie in it. I seem to remember we were doing eighteen miles an hour and I was really concentrating - because some of the time I just felt normal and then, before I knew where I was, it was all crazy again. Anyway, we got home safe and sound, and somewhere down the line John and Cynthia got home. I went to bed and lay there for, like, three years.

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

I was suddenly left with nothing in my hands but a handful of crazy stars.