Susanna Kaysen Quotes

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

Whatever was about, whoever I had seen, and heard rocking, and who had passed me by just now, whoever had opened the locked door was not 'real'. No. But what was 'real'? At that moment I began to doubt my own reality.

Insanity is believing your hallucinations are real. Religion is believing that other peoples' hallucinations are real.

I realized either I was crazy or the world was crazy; and I picked on the world. And of course I was right.

The logic of a madman is a sane man's confusion.

A man might pass for insane who should see things as they are.

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

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

If you are delusional, sometimes the reality catches up with your delusion, and then all of a sudden you are a genius.

The only difference between me and a madman is that I'm not mad.

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

It is not easy to distinguish reality from illusion, especially when one lives in a period of the great upheaval.

Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.

We're all mad, the whole damned race. We're wrapped in illusions, delusions, confusions about the penetrability of partitions, we're all mad and in solitary confinement.

When a man mistakes his thoughts for persons and things, he is mad.

First sign of madness, talking to your own head.

My name is Stephen Leeds, and I am perfectly sane. My hallucinations, however, are all quite mad.

Madmen always think it's the others who are mad.

People assume that they perceive reality as it is, that our senses accurately record the outside world. Yet the science suggests that, in important ways, people experience reality not as it is, but as they expect it to be.

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.

Truth and dreams are always getting muddled.

Getting lost in human perception is a very scary idea.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

In a mad world, only the mad are sane.