Shirley Jackson Quotes

I wonder if being sane means disregarding the chaos that is life, pretending only an infinitesimal segment of it is reality.

There is no insanity so devastating in man's life as utter sanity.

Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.

A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?

'Hamlet' is one of the most dangerous things ever set down on paper. All the big, unknowable questions like what it is to be a human being; the difference between sanity and insanity; the meaning of life and death; what's real and not real. All these subjects can literally drive you mad.

I'm not saying I talk to cartoon characters all the time, but the characters are very real to me. In a very non-insane way.

I do believe that reality is dreadful and that you are forced to choose it in the end or go crazy, but that it kills you.

Her sanity was a fragile thing, a butterfly cupped in her hands, that she carried with her everywhere, afraid of what would happen if she let it go-or got careless and crushed it.

The funny part of it all is that relatively few people seem to go crazy, relatively few even a little crazy or even a little weird, relatively few, and those few because they have nothing to do that is to say they have nothing to do or they do not do anything that has anything to do with the war only with food and cold and little things like that.

There is considerable danger that a man will be crazy between dinner and supper; but it will not directly answer any good purposethat I know of, and it is just as easy to be sane.

Oh yes! The one man in the world who never believes he's mad is the madman.

Only the half-mad are wholly alive.

I think we're all pretty crazy on this bus. I'm not sure I know anyone who's got all the dots on his or her dice.

Sanity - a trick of agreement

My mother isn't crazy. She simply has a harder time than most reconciling her reality with everyone else's reality.

It is possible to be truly mad and to still exist upon scraps of life.

Sanity is a compromise.

Insanity is just a state of mind.

If we were never depressed we should not be alive; it is the nature of a crystal never to be depressed.

Some lose all mind and become soul,insane. some lose all soul and become mind, intellectual. some lose both and become accepted

Consciousness in the individual is that area where the totality of life is located.

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

If I haven't had any long term psychological side effects from all the things I've already done on this show, this isn't gonna hurt much more.

Madness is not a consequence of uncertainty but of certainty.

A lot of the time I'm semi-insane, but there is a slight bit of intelligence there.