Susanna Kaysen Quotes

When you are insane, you are busy being insane-all the time ... when I was crazy, that was all I was.

I've written this song called 'Insania' - it's a mix of Insane and Mania, and even though it's a made up word you instantly know what it means!

I've always been a lunatic.

Man is the only animal who is prone to insanity.

Insanity hovered close at hand, like an eager waiter at an expensive restaurant.

To put it in layman's terms, crazy is crazy. And crazy will find a way to do something crazy. Racist is racist. And racist people will find a way to project their racism onto the world.

Madness, as I understood it from books, meant a person who was open to the high white whine of everything.

That's the nice thing about insanity: evil people kill you, but crazy ones try to make you understand.

Not crazy in a 'let's paint the kitchen bright red!' sort of way. But crazy in a 'gas oven, toothpaste sandwich, I am God' sort of way. Gone were the days when she would stand on the deck lighting lemon-scented candles without then having to eat the wax.p28

What frightens us most in a madman is his sane conversation.

When you are insane, you are busy being insane - all the time.

What a terrible thing to have lost one's mind. Or not to have a mind at all. How true that is.

I'm not psycho... I just like psychotic things.

The general opinion of Lugard is that he is a lunatic …

There's something messed up with my brain.

I've always been interested in obsessive, insane people.

It's difficult to describe the weirdness of speaking to a man who appears to be perfectly in control of his faculties, who can deliver off-the-cuff repartee, and yet who is actually utterly disconnected from who he is.

Raving mad is quite easy. You just chew up the scenery or something. It's quiet mad that's hard.

Madness to us means reversion; to such people as Una and Lena it meant progression. Now their uncle had entered into a land beyond them, the land of fancy. For fifty years he had been as they were, silent, hard-working, unimaginative. Then all of a sudden, like a scholar passing his degree, he had gone up into another form.

Insanity is to behave like someone that you are not.

As for the demented, I hold it certain that all beings deprived of reason are thus afflicted only by the Devil.

First sign of madness, talking to your own head.

There is a madness, yes, this is true. Few mortals possess it, the willingness to step away from the protection of sanity. To walk into the wild wood of madness...

But yet I am firmly persuaded that a great deal of consciousness, every sort of consciousness, in fact, is a disease.

Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry.