The ordinary lunatic is generally a harmless, isolated case; since everyone sees that something is wrong with him, he is quickly taken care of. But the unconscious infections of groups of so-called normal people are...

There is a duality to darkness known only to those who’ve been infected by its touch. Everyone knows the shadows: shallow, comfortable, mostly harmless places where one might nest for a night. But the depths...

Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the Earth goes round the Sun; today, to believe the past is inalterable....

I swear that each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant – impossible socially, but full-scale – and that it’s the knockings and baterrings we sometimes hear in each other...

Nothing can be more slightly defined than the line of demarcation between sanity and insanity … Make the definition too narrow, it becomes meaningless; make it too wide, and the whole human race becomes involved...

When you are gunning to be like other people, you are foolishly repeating their mistakes, and the worst of it all is that you can’t even correct yours.

Calling it lunacy makes it easier to explain away the things we don’t understand.