""It is naively assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideas and feelings proves the validity of these ideas and feelings. Nothing could be further from the truth. Consensual validation as such has no bearing on reason or mental health.""
— Erich Fromm

"I compare myself with my former self, not with others. Not only that, I tend to compare my current self with the best I have been, which is when I have been midly manic. When I am my present "normal" self, I am far removed from when I have been my liveliest, most productive, most intense, most outgoing and effervescent. In sort, for myself, I am a hard act to follow."
— Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)

"Lunatics are similar to designated hitters. Often an entire family is crazy, but since an entire family can't go into the hospital, one person is designated as crazy and goes inside. Then, depending on how the rest of the family is feeling that person is kept inside or snatched out, to prove something about the family's mental health."
— Susanna Kaysen (Girl, Interrupted (Faber and Faber Screenplays) Screenplay based on the book)

"There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you're high it's tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one's marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends' faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against-- you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality."
— Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)

"It is merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your thoughts while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain tap in Morse code on your bedroom window."
— Sam Harris (The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason)

"There never can be a man so lost as one who is lost in the vast and intricate corridors of his own lonely mind, where none may reach and none may save."
— Isaac Asimov (Pebble in the Sky)

"Our society tends to regard as a sickness any mode of thought or behavior that is inconvenient for the system and this is plausible because when an individual doesn't fit into the system it causes pain to the individual as well as problems for the system. Thus the manipulation of an individual to adjust him to the system is seen as a cure for a sickness and therefore as good."
— Theodore Kaczynski

"the intensity, glory, and absolute assuredness if my mind's flight made it very difficult for me to believe once i was better, that the illness was one i should willingly give up....moods are such an essential part of the substance of life, of one's notion of oneself, that even psychotic extremes in mood and behavior somehow can be seen as temporary, even understandable reactions to what life has dealt....even though the depressions that inevitably followed nearly cost me my life."
— Kay Redfield Jamison

"But money spent while manic doesn't fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense or business loss. So after mania, when most depressed, you're given excellent reason to be even more so."
— Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)

"Don’t ask me those questions! Don’t ask me what life means or how we know reality or why we have to suffer so much. Don’t talk about how nothing feels real, how everything is coated with gelatin and shining like oil in the sun. I don’t want to hear about the tiger in the corner or the Angel of Death or the phone calls from John the Baptist."
— Susanna Kaysen

"Some seek the comfort of their therapist's office, other head to the corner pub and dive into a pint, but I chose running as my therapy."
— Dean Karnazes (Ultramarathon Man)

"Fat realized that one of two possibilities existed and only two; either Dr. Stone was totally insane – not just insane but totally so – or else in an artful, professional fashion he had gotten Fat to talk; he had drawn Fat out and now knew that Fat was totally insane."
— Philip K. Dick (VALIS)

"...the thought crossed her mind that a bed was really a very strange thing-a human nest, really, where our human fragility made its nightly demands for comfort and cosseting"
— Alexander McCall Smith

"Am I a mindless fool? My life is a fragment, a disconnected dream that has no continuity. I am so tired of senselessness. I am tired of the music that my feelings sing, the dream music."
— Ross David Burke (When the Music's Over)

"I'm convinced that responsibility is some kind of psychological disease."
— Brandon Sanderson (Alcatraz Versus the Knights of Crystallia)

"and for every statement I make to you pointing out that or any view point, I can give you twenty two more all in conflict with one another. They all belong to me and none of them belongs to me."
— The troops for Trudie Chase

"Getting from La Jolla to Alta Vista State Hospital isn't easy, unless you have a car or a breakdown. April's Father had a breakdown and they got him there in no time."
— Tobias Wolff (The Night in Question: Stories)

""It is merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your thoughts while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain tap in Morse code on your bedroom window.""
— Sam Harris (The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason)

"I appear at times merry and in good heart, talk, too, before others quite reasonably, and it looks as if I felt, too, God knows how well within my skin. Yet the soul maintains its deathly sleep and the heart bleeds from a thousand wounds. "
— Hugo Wolf

"About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be defined as the general neurosis of our times."
— Carl Jung

"Is he mad? Anyway there's something on his mind, as sure as there must be something on a deck when it cracks."
— Herman Melville