Delmore Schwartz Quotes

I like 'nerves'! I like the word 'migraineur'. I like the word 'madness'. These are OK words. The 19th century had a very handy term: 'neurasthenic'. I think that's a very useful word. We all know what that means: it means extra-sensitive.

We're all controlled neurotics.

Hysteria is something that I've been interested for a very long time. I thought I might have it, but it seems that it's unlikely.

If we weren't all crazy, we'd just go insane.

The drug habit is the unfailing accompaniment of the neurosis produced by this wonderful age of private-owned machinery. Machinery imposes an exhaustive drain on the nervous system. It compels an acceleration and competition in all departments of life, that is reflected in increased physical breakdown. Drugs then step in as a stimulant.

Don't talk to me about Freud. I'll go up the wall!

The fear of life is the favorite disease of the 20th century.

I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?

We all go a little mad sometimes.

A lot of times I feel I probably would have ended up in a mental hospital if it weren't for the structure that 'Bones' gave me.

Stress is nothing more than a socially acceptable form of mental illness.

Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.

I wouldn't say I have a lack of fear. In fact, I'd like my fear emotion to be less because it's very distracting and fries my nervous system.

I think everybody's nuts.

I am neurotic, but I live with it. I think most people are, anyway.

A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist.

Without anxiety and illness I should have been like a ship without a rudder.

Positive psychology is not remotely intended to replace therapy or pharmacology. So when depressed, anxious or in panic or post-traumatic stress disorder, I am all for therapies that will work. Positive psychology is another arrow in the quiver of public policy and psychology through which we can raise wellbeing above zero.

Doubt is to certainty as neurosis is to psychosis. The neurotic is in doubt and has fears about persons and things; the psychotic has convictions and makes claims about them. In short, the neurotic has problems, the psychotic has solutions.

To say that my anxiety is reducible to the ions in my amygdala is as limiting as saying that my personality or my soul is reducible to the molecules that make up my brain cells or to the genes that underwrote them.

People can die of mere imagination.

I often joke that I straddle psychosis and neurosis, and that being an artist keeps me in the middle, so I can work between the two.

I do find real life a bit overwhelming sometimes. I'm totally chaotic.

If you want to be depressed every day, there's plenty of material. The world is crazy.

When I was a kid, I was mostly pretty sane. I've gotten more hypochondriacal.