Madness Quotes (page 41)
And all at once the heavy night. Fell from my eyes and I could see, --A drenched and dripping apple-tree, A last long line of silver rain, A sky grown clear and blue again. And as I looked a quickening gust. Of wind blew up to me and thrust. Into my face a miracle. Of orchard-breath, and with the smell, --I know not how such things can be! --I breathed my soul back into me. Ah! Up then from the ground sprang IAnd hailed the earth with such a cry. As is not heard save from a man. Who has been...
Edna St. Vincent Millay
God did not live in this church; these statues gave an image to nothingness. I was the supernatural in this cathedral. I was the only Supermortal thing that stood conscious under this roof! Loneliness. Loneliness to the point of madness. The cathedral crumbled in my vision; the saints listed and fell. Rats ate the Holy Eucharist and nested on the sills. A solitary rat with an enormous tail stood tugging and gnawing at the rotted altar cloth until the candlesticks fell and rolled on the...
Anne Rice
The point is... to live one's life in the full complexity of what one is, which is something much darker, more contradictory, more of a maelstrom of impulses and passions, of cruelty, ecstacy, and madness, than is apparent to the civilized being who glides on the surface and fits smoothly into the world.
Thomas Nagel
There is no art without intoxication. But I mean a mad intoxication! Let reason teeter! Delirium! The highest degree of delirium! Plunged in burning dementia! Art is the most enrapturing orgy within man's reach.. Art must make you laugh a little and make you a little afraid. Anything as long as it doesn't bore.
Jean Dubuffet
The Photograph is an extended, loaded evidence? as if it caricatured not the figure of what it represents (quite the converse) but its very existence ... The Photograph then becomes a bizarre (i)medium(i), a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest (o)shared(i) hallucination (on the one hand 'it is not there,' on the other 'but it has indeed been'): a mad image, chafed by reality.
Roland Barthes
Dreams are rough copies of the waking soul Yet uncorrected of the higher will, So that men sometimes in their dreams confess. An unsuspected, or forgotten, self; -Since Dreaming, Madness, Passion, are akin. In missing each that salutory rein. Of reason, and the grinding will of man.
Pedro Calderon de la Barca