Augusten Burroughs Quotes

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

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

Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.

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

I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.

I can only presume that you have gone out of your mind.

Even if one understands that what one is doing is mad, it is indeed still madness -

Well, love is insanity. The ancient Greeks knew that. It is the taking over of a rational and lucid mind by delusion and self-destruction. You lose yourself, you have no power over yourself, you can't even think straight.

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

Men are mad most of their lives; few live sane, fewer die so. The acts of people are baffling unless we realize that their wits are disordered. Man is driven to justice by his lunacy.

I don't think you ever know in yourself whether you have gone mad.

Possibly he knew, as he wrote this, that he was mad - because inside every madman sits a little sane man saying 'You're mad, you're mad.'

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

... the work of lunatics.

… the ravings of a maniac

The human race consists of the dangerously insane and such as are not.

Insanity is to behave like someone that you are not.

If you went crazy, would you know it?

First sign of madness, talking to your own head.

'Insanity... I like it."

He is mad past recovery, but yet he has lucid intervals.

Eccentricty had flowered into madness.

When a man says that he is Jesus or Napoleon, or that the Martians are after him, or claims something else that seems outrageous to common sense, he is labeled psychotic and locked up in a madhouse. Freedom of speech is only for normal people.

You want to hear about insanity? I was found running naked through the jungles in Mexico. At the Mexico City airport, I decided I was in the middle of a movie and walked out on the wing on takeoff. My body... my liver... okay, my brain... went.

He stares at me, and then leans back in his chair. "He's ill, Jacob." I say nothing. "He's a paragon schnitzophonic." "He's what?!" "Paragon schnitzophonic," repeats Uncle Al. "You mean paranoid schizophrenic?" "Sure. Whatever. But the bottom line is he's mad as a hatter.