William Faulkner Quotes

I have seen mad people, and I have known some who were quite intelligent, lucid, even clear-sighted in every concern of life, except on one point. They could speak clearly, readily, profoundly on everything; till their thoughts were caught in the breakers of their delusions and went to pieces there, were dispersed and swamped in that furious and terrible sea of fogs and squalls which is called MADNESS.

Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing

Oh! thou who are greatly mad, deign to spare me who am less mad.

Insanity is catching.

Plenty of crazy people in New York. There are so many crazy people here, I think it's like one out of every one person is completely out of their mind.

[Madness] is the jail we could all end up in. And we know it. And watch our step. For a lifetime. We behave. A fantastic and entire system of social control, by the threat of example as effective over the general population as detention centers in dictatorships, the image of the madhouse floats through every mind for the course of its lifetime.

Eccentricty had flowered into madness.

Madness is a divine release of the soul from the yoke of custom and convention.

All that makes a lunatic are the very ordinary ideas of mankind shut up inside a man's head.

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

The different sorts of madness are innumerable.

We want a few mad people now. See where the sane ones have landed us!

But I'm Crazy. I swear to God I am.

The problem with being nuts, she thought, is that you don't always feel as if you're nuts. Sometimes, in fact, you feel perfectly sane, and there just happens to be a trailer-shaped dragon crouching in the lot next door.

Insanity hovered close at hand, like an eager waiter at an expensive restaurant.

The thing about crazy people; they don't know they are crazy, that's what make them crazy.

Madness has its own dynamism. It just goes on.

I say, Watson,’ he whispered, ‘would you be afraid to sleep in the same room as a lunatic, a man with softening of the brain, an idiot whose mind has lost its grip?’ ‘Not in the least,’ I answered in astonishment. ‘Ah, that’s lucky,’ he said, and not another word would he utter that night.

Viewed from the summit of reason, all life looks like a malignant disease and the world like a madhouse.

Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence.

I am not strictly speaking mad, for my mind is absolutely normal in the intervals, and even more so than before. But during the attacks it is terrible - and then I lose consciousness of everything. But that spurs me on to work and to seriousness, as a miner who is always in danger makes haste in what he does.

Madness breeds madness.

So this is what insanity is. Not goofy behavior, but watching a sudden change in the world you used to know.

Insanity is a legal term. Crazy is an art form.

Acid gave me a clinical, unblinking look at madness, and I discovered I wasn't brave enough to be insane.