Jimmy Piersall Quotes

Most of my world is in London, and I feel like this is where I went mad and ended up finding myself.

Everybody in the world knew who I was before I knew who I was.

I realized that I had screwed up my life living different parts of my life in different places. I wasn't whole. I wasn't integrated. I wasn't a complete person. And after that, came out, spent some time at a psychiatric hospital.

Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.

I don't know if you know who you are, until you lose who you are.

An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.

I do worry about young people in the business who have experienced a lot of success and are punted around doing those manic publicity trails, when you don't really know who you are yet.

You have to know who you are, if you don't you have nightmares.

Pippin chooses love and finds a greater sense of himself at the end of all the madness. I relate to him in many ways. I have been through stuff, thought I knew best, and often been proven wrong.

I'd reached a point where there was a direct conflict between what I was trying to be and who I really was.

Anybody can get lost in themselves.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.

I kind of see myself as a cartoon that's on its way to becoming a real person that has to find that special amulet or mushroom to get to that next realm or level. I don't feel like anything is that tangible. It freaks me out, why I feel unhappy or conflicted and why that can change on a dime.

My life has changed. I'm not walking around any more wishing I wasn't me, which was the case at one time.

When you're telling a story, the best stories, every character has an arc. Every one. And that arc is usually about finding yourself, or about at least finding something about yourself that you didn't know.

I lost myself in the process and I realized how much I had identified myself with Maria Shriver, newswoman. When that was gone, I had to really sit back and go, 'Well, actually, who am I today?'

All my life, I have taken inventory at intervals. For example, when I became a movie actor and suddenly I had to deal with fame, money and playing so many roles, I lost myself. I said, 'Who am I?' And I wrote my first book to deal with that, 'The Ragman's Son.'

I went to find myself and save myself by being an agent.

It's an interesting thing when you discover something about yourself. To go: 'Wow, I'm not the person I thought I was. I'm in the middle of something and I can't actually deal with it.'

You have to lose yourself to find yourself.

So I constantly play women who are damaged and out of touch, who are seeking without knowing, or knowing without the skills to transform their lives. But then, that's really the fate of many women today.

Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.

I don't feel like a 40-year-old. I feel more like four 10-year-olds, each pulling in a different direction.

I am very abnormal... But it wasn't very long ago that I wasn't so abnormal. I was very normal and headed for a lifetime of paying medical bills as proof of my normalcy.

It takes madness to find out madness.