Aldous Huxley Quotes

I lived in the first century of world wars. Most mornings I would be more or less insane.

Hold it, Doc, a world war passed through my brain. He said, Nurse, get your pad, this boy's insane.

Given my heritage and the ordeal of my childhood, I sometimes wonder why I myself am not insane. Maybe I am.

I have friends who have had PTSD, and you can get it from other things than war.

The negative effects of combat were nightmares, and I'd get jumpy around certain noises and stuff, but you'd have that after a car accident or a bad divorce. Life's filled with trauma. You don't need to go to war to find it; it's going to find you. We all deal with it, and the effects go away after awhile. At least they did for me.

My theory is that Kurt had a lot of residual pain from his childhood. And when you pile that on top of his experience in World War II - he was in Dresden when it was bombed and saw a city annihilated. When you combine those two things, my impression of Kurt Vonnegut at 84 was that he was a very pained and haunted man.

I've been insane from a very early age.

I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.

You know how a lot of people say they could go crazy? Well, I feel I live very close to that line.

Most of the depressions are self-created. A few people are pathologically ill: they cannot help it. It just comes from within because of genetic and other factors. But almost everybody else can be driven to madness, because the line between sanity and insanity is quite thin.

When people come back from war and combat and they see things that maybe a lot of the folks in this room have seen many times over, and you're strong and you can handle it, but a lot of people can't handle it.

I was one of those people raised by a woman who was what I call a prisoner of war. She was captured, she didn't want to be there, she was unhappy, she was banging away in the kitchen, the way that a prisoner would bang on her jail cell, you know, really unhappy. She had to cook for nine people with really little money, so she really just got burned out. So I didn't know that you could actually cook and it would be calming, pleasurable.

If all the people who have been hurt by the war were to exclude joy from their lives, it would almost be as if they had died.

The portrayal of post-traumatic stress disorder and things like that felt really big and important.

The only reason I remembered this play was because it had a mad person in it, and everything I had ever read about mad people stuck in my mind, while everything else flew out.

Revelation is where all crazy people end up. It's the last stop on the nutso express.

I'd have a nervous breakdown except that I've been through this too many times to be nervous.

At 19, your brain hasn't finished wiring itself. So the first time you have a good friend die, most people don't go through that at 19. Soldiers do. They're facing life in this accelerated, compressed form, and a lot of times, they're not ready for it.

The ability to "fantasize" is the ability to survive. It's wonderful to speak about this subject because there have been so many wrong-headed people dealing with it.... The so-called realists are trying to drive us insane, and I refuse to be driven insane.... We survive by fantasizing. Take that away from us and the whole damned human race goes down the drain.

The thought, when written down, becomes less oppressive, but some thoughts are like a cancerous tumor: you express is, you excise it, and it grows back worse than before.

Years of depression have robbed me of that—well, that give, that elasticity that everyone else calls perspective.

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.

There is no difference between acute schizophrenia and a world at war.

I'm someone who lived in a war for five years. I received bombs on my head every day of my childhood. Did that stop me from living? Did that stop me from laughing?