Insane Asylum Quotes

A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.

It is not seen as insane when a fighter, under an attack that will inevitable lead to his death, chooses to take his own life first. In fact, this act has been encouraged for centuries, and is accepted even now as an honorable reason to do the deed. How is it any different when you are under attack by your own mind?

I wonder if rooms in an insane asylum have Do Not Disturb signs for the doors. I should hope not, because knock or no knock, every occupant in those rooms is already disturbed.

Some are born mad, some achieve madness, and some have madness thrust upon 'em.

Earth is the insane asylum of the universe.

All boys belong in insane asylums.

This girl is destroying me. A girl who has spent the last year in an insane asylum. A girl who would try to shoot me dead for kissing her. A girl who ran off with another man just to get away from me. Of course this is the girl I would fall for. I close a hand over my mouth. I am losing my mind.

If there’s life on other planets, then the earth is the Universe’s insane asylum.

How had I ever thought he was cute? He so needed to be locked up in an insane asylum somewhere. Too bad Batman wasn't here to come and drag his ass off to Arkham.

We did just leave an insane asylum,” Hi agreed. “For all we know, Chance spend his nights dancing naked with sock puppets, plotting to invade Canada.

I, myself, spent 9 years in an insane asylum and never had any suicidal tendencies, but I know that every conversation I had with a psychiatrist during the morning visit made me long to hang myself because I was aware that I could not slit his throat.

Louisiana is a fresh-air mental asylum.

Wasn't that awesome?" Seth asked. Warren cocked his head, his expression mildly embarrassed. "I'm sorry, Kendra--it was pretty cool." "All boys belong in insane asylums," Kendra said.

Surely my macking on some guy in an insane asylum wouldn't hurt him. He'd been living with his stalker, for heaven's sake.

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

We have much to be judged on when he comes, slums and battlefields and insane asylums, but these are the symptoms of our illness and the result of our failures in love.

EARTH: THE INSANE ASYLUM OF THE UNIVERSE.

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy! Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman's an angel! The bum's as holy as the seraphim! the madman is holy as you my soul are holy! The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy! Holy Peter holy Allen holy Solomon holy Lucien holy Kerouac holy Huncke holy Burroughs holy Cas- sady holy the unknown buggered and suffering beggars holy the hideous human angels! Holy my mother in the insane asylum! Holy the cocks of the grandfathers of Kansas! Holy the groaning saxophone! Holy the bop apocalypse! Holy the jazzbands marijuana hipsters peace & junk & drums! Holy the solitudes of skyscrapers and pavements! Holy the cafeterias filled with the millions! Holy the mysterious rivers of tears under the streets! Holy the lone juggernaut! Holy the vast lamb of the middle class! Holy the crazy shepherds of rebell- ion! Who digs Los Angeles IS Los Angeles! Holy New York Holy San Francisco Holy Peoria & Seattle Holy Paris Holy Tangiers Holy Moscow Holy Istanbul! Holy time in eternity holy eternity in time holy the clocks in space holy the fourth dimension holy the fifth International holy the Angel in Moloch! Holy the sea holy the desert holy the railroad holy the locomotive holy the visions holy the hallucina- tions holy the miracles holy the eyeball holy the abyss! Holy forgiveness! mercy! charity! faith! Holy! Ours! bodies! suffering! magnanimity! Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!

He mouths something. Six words. Six words that seem too impossible to be true. Six words that bleed hope into my soul. Six words. “You’re not crazy. I love you.

When majority is insane, sane must go to asylum.

No, I won't leave the world--I'll enter a lunatic asylum and see if the profundity of insanity reveals to me the riddles of life. Idiot, why didn't I do that long ago, why has it taken me so long to understand what it means when the Indians honour the insane, step aside for them? Yes, a lunatic asylum--don't you think I may end up there?

If someone tells you you're crazy enough times, eventually it becomes true. It's that old psychiatrist's joke: insanity's all in your head.

Addy, living one day without you would never be for the best. I want you every minute of every day. Forever. I love you.

South Carolina is too small for a Republic, and too big for an insane asylum. [James L. Petigru (1789-1863), following the state's vote to secede from the Union in 1860]

It seemed to me I was living in an insane asylum of my own making. I went about with all these fantastic figures: centaurs, nymphs, satyrs, gods and goddesses, as though they were patients and I was analyzing them. I read a Greek or Negro myth as if a lunatic were telling me his anamnesis.

I see now the virtue in madness, for this country knows no law nor any boundary. I pity the poor shades confined to the Euclidean prison that is sanity

Insane asylum - a place where insanity is made.

God judges men from the inside out; men judge men from the outside in. Perhaps to God, an extreme mental patient is doing quite well in going a month without murder, for he fought his chemical imbalance and succeeded; oppositely, perhaps the healthy, able and stable man who has never murdered in his life yet went a lifetime consciously, willingly never loving anyone but himself may then be subject to harsher judgment than the extreme mental patient. It might be so that God will stand for the weak and question the strong.

Being bored is the price we pay for not being insane.

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. ~William Wordsworth Being an author is like being in charge of your own personal insane asylum. ~Graycie Harmon

The insane asylum on Blackwell's Island is a human rat-trap. It is easy to get in, but once there it is impossible to get out.

Yes, I want to tell her, and maybe I even do say that, but I am crying because whatever gifts, the pieces of good buried inside and under so much that I feel is bad, is wrong, is twisted, are less clear than the ability to hit a ball with a bat and break the scoreboard or do a triple pirouette in the air on ice. My gifts are for life itself, for an unfortunately astute understanding of all the cruelty and pain in the world. My gifts are unspecific. I am an artist manque, someone full of crazy ideas and grandiloquent needs and even a little bit of happiness, but with no particular way to express it. I am like the title character in the film Betty Blue, the woman who is so full of...so full of...so full of something or other-it is unclear what, but a definite energy that can't find its medium-who pokes her own eyes out with a scissors and is murdered by her lover in an insane asylum in the end. She is, and I am becoming, a complete waste. So I cry at the end of The Natural.

South Carolina is too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum.

I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat! --- ANTONIN ARTAUD

EARTH: THE INSANE ASYLUM OF THE UNIVERSE. —T-SHIRT

I said to him, "Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.

The other night we talked about literature's elimination of the unessential, so that we are given a concentrated "dose" of life. I said, almost indignantly, "That's the danger of it, it prepares you to live, but at the same time, it exposes you to disappointments because it gives a heightened concept of living, it leaves out the dull or stagnant moments. You, in your books, also have a heightened rhythm, and a sequence of events so packed with excitement that i expected all your life to be delirious, intoxicated." Literature is an exaggeration, a dramatization, and those who are nourished on it (as I was) are in great danger of trying to approximate an impossible rhythm. Trying to live up to dostoevskian scenes every day. And between writers there is a straining after extravagance. We incite each other to jazz-up our rhythm. It is amusing that, when Henry, Fred, and I talked together, we fell back into a deep naturalness. Perhaps none of us is a sensational character. Or perhaps we have no need of condiments. Henry is, in reality, mild not temperamental; gentle not eager for scenes. We may all write about sadism, masochism, the grand quignol, bubu de montparnasse (in which the highest proof of love is for a pimp to embrace his woman's syphilis as fervently as herself, a noblesse-oblige of the apache world), cocteau, drugs, insane asylums, house of the dead, because we love strong colors; and yet when we sit in the cafe de la place clichy, we talk about henry's last pages, and a chapter which was too long, and richard's madness. "One of his greatest worries," said Henry, "was to have introduced us. He thinks you are wonderful and that you may be in danger from the 'gangster author.

I'm thinking of killing everyone whose name is a palindrome

They are walking the line between genius and insanity.

You left me in the middle of the goddamn woods, in a fucking insane asylum. You piece of fucking shit!

America is an insane asylum.

We realize we can't go around saying and doing what we're actually thinking and feeling. If we all did that, life would be a lunatic asylum. Indeed, that's how you know you're talking to a lunatic. Lunatics are those poor souls who have lost their inner communication and so they allow themselves to say and do exactly what they are thinking and feeling and that's why they're mad.

So stop eating yourself up. Things will go where they're supposed to go if you just let them take their natural course. Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it's time for them to be hurt. Life is like that. I know I sound like I'm preaching from a pulpit, but it's about time you learned to live like this. You try too hard to make life fit your way of doing things.If you don't want to spend time in an insane asylum, you have to open up a little more and let yourself go with life's natural flow.

One either cares what others think about him, or cares what others think he thinks about them. If you want to find someone who doesn't care in the slightest what anyone thinks, try a lunatic asylum.

Oh Christ, he understood more than he wanted to right now. Give me a chance, Louis thought, and I’ll understand myself right into the nearest mental asylum.

When you go with first principles, a giant light goes off in what you think is a city and turns out to be an insane asylum.

Normal people don’t wall their wives up in insane asylums. They don’t disinherit their sons because they didn’t get the child they wanted.

Being an author is like being in charge of your own personal insane asylum.

Sweet," Stacey said. "Well, let's go check out the dark basement of the abandoned insane asylum. Nothing could possibly go wrong down there.

Folly is so human that it has common roots with poetry and tragedy; it is revealed as much in the insane asylum as in the writings of a Cervantes or a Shakespeare, or in the deep psychological insights and cries of revolt of a Nietzsche.

Life is pain. Life is chaos. It´s never easy. Always a struggle.

Soy como un remolino en medio de un mar agitado, una vez que estás en mi camino no tengo elección, te agarraré de la pierna y te hundiré.

To go into acting is like asking for admission to an insane asylum. Anyone may apply, but only the certifiably insane are admitted.

a mental hospital, insanity, an insane asylum, where people were not ashamed to say that they were crazy, where no one stopped doing something they were enjoying just to be nice to others.

Ahora hay dolor otra vez. El sedante no puede quitar este tipo de dolor. No importa cuantas drogas me den. Lo sé. Nunca, ninguna cantidad de drogas podrá quitar el dolor que acompaña a un corazón roto.

I have a moment where I finally realize that the aching heart, the longing, the grief, the insanity...I finally get it after all these month. That all those things combined are what letting go feels like.

Communism is as crude an attempt to explain society and the individual as if a surgeon were to perform his delicate operations with a meat ax. All that is subtle in human psychology and in the structure of society (which is even more complex), all of this is reduced to crude economic processes. The whole created being—man—is reduced to matter. It is characteristic that Communism is so devoid of arguments that it has none to advance against its opponents in our Communist countries. It lacks arguments and hence there is the club, the prison, the concentration camp, and insane asylums with forced confinement.

Las palabras resuenan en mi cabeza. Hermosas palabras que una vez me dedicó a mí. —Addy, eres mi sol, mi luna y mis estrellas. Eres mi cielo, mi infierno y mi tierra. Iría a cualquier parte por ti. Te seguiré a cualquier parte. Y él está aquí.

Dos corazones latiendo. Lado a lado. Piel contra piel. Y un intenso amor inquebrantable entre dos personas que nunca morirá.

it seemed to me I was living in an insane asylum of my own making. I went about with all these fantastic figures: centaurs, nymphs, satyrs, gods and goddesses, as though they were patients and I was analyzing them. I read a Greek or a Negro myth as if a lunatic were telling me his anamnesis.

I just want you to know that you are my sun, my moon, and my stars. My heaven, my hell, and my earth. I’d do anything for you. I’d go anywhere for you. If you ever left me, I’d follow you.

If we were to gain God's perspective, even for a moment, and were to look at the way we go through life accumulating and hoarding and displaying our things, we would have the same feelings of horror and pity that any sane person has when he views people in an asylum endlessly beating their heads against the wall.

Él dice algo. Seis palabras. Seis palabras que parecen imposibles para ser ciertas. Seis palabras que destilan esperanza dentro de mi alma. Seis palabras. —No estás loca. Te amo

My insane mind wants to create a world, where craziness is treated normal.

All boys belong in insane asylums,” Kendra said.

Bedlam,” Matthew said. The term for insane asylums had been used for many years, and originated in the clamor and ravings of the mad persons locked within.

I want the insane asylum kind of love.

The employment of children is doing more to fill prisons, insane asylums, almshouses, reformatories, slums, and gin shops than all the efforts of reformers are doing to improve society.

I merely question the sanity of those who would criminalize, and, worse, brand as insane, the poor, the wretched, the oppressed, the persecuted, the abused, who find a death of their own choosing preferable to a life of someone else’s.

Two boys with intelligent minds trapped in bodies that would not cooperate, caged in cribs like toddlers living in an insane asylum... They were cheered by the tiniest of things... It was outrageous. Fortunately, time was something they had a great deal of and they made good use of it.

Por favor, Ojos azules. Sálvame. Sé mi príncipe azul. Mi caballero con brillante armadura. 10 Rescátame de esta torre ardiente de depresión, tristeza y miseria. No lo hace. No lo hará. No puede.

All of a sudden his books, which had hitherto been merely a fond decoration and a means of letting his mind free itself from the grim routines of Broadmoor life, had become his most precious possession. For the time being at least he could set aside his imaginings about the harm that people were trying to inflict on him and his person: It was instead his hundreds of books that now needed to be kept safe, and away from the predators with whom he believed the asylum to be infested. His books, and his work on the words he found in them, were about to become the defining feature of his newly chosen life.

Newton was haunted by insanity. He spent hours trying to find hidden messages in the Bible, and wrote over a million words on religion and the occult. He pursued the medieval art of alchemy, obsessively searching for the philosopher’s stone, a mythical substance that alchemists believed had magical properties and could even help humans achieve immortality. At the age of fifty, Newton became fully psychotic and spent a year in an insane asylum.

For eight years I was an inmate in a state asylum for the insane. During those years I passed through such unbearable terror that I deteriorated into a wild, frightened creature intent only on survival. And I survived. I was raped by orderlies, gnawed on by rats and poisoned by tainted food. I was chained in padded cells, strapped into strait-jackets and half-drowned in ice baths. And I survived. The asylum itself was a steel trap, and I was not released from its jaws alive and victorious. I crawled out mutilated, whimpering and terribly alone. But I did survive.

When one finds oneself in the kind of strange, unsettling circumstances as I presently find myself, it is only natural, after all, to have a few, unusual, vivid dreams.

Madness is born in the blood. It is my birthright.

The hours wear on, while the surreal atmosphere of the asylum does not wear off.

Great," Lee sighed, side-stepping through. "Just when I thought I'd gotten out of wandering through the creepy graveyard, you find another way." Smiling as he followed her through, he assured her, "Don't worry, I'm a professional." He seemed to find her nervousness amusing. "And just so you know," she grumbled, "this absolutely does not count as our date." He burst out laughing. "That's too bad. Now I'll have to make other plans. How do you feel about abandoned insane asylums?

I spent hours yesterday talking of little but medical symptoms and insane asylums. And you listened as though it were poetry and all but swooned at my feet. It is too bad I don't have any medical treatises about. I'm sure I need read a paragraph or two, and you will become ravenous with lust and begin tearing my clothes off. (Dorian from "The Mad Earl's Bride")

It’s the self-fulfilling prophecy of madness. If someone tells you you’re crazy enough times, eventually it becomes true. It’s that old psychiatrist’s joke: insanity’s all in your head.

The flower, as he saw it, ruled over evil; it absorbed in itself all innocently shed blood (that is why it is so red) all tears and all the gall of humanity. It was an awful and mysterious being, the antitheses of God, an Ahriman presenting a most unassuming and innocent appearance. It was necessary to break it off and kill it. But this was not all; it was also necessary not to permit it at its death to discharge its evil upon the world.

Insane asylum' - among the great narrative options, that'd be one step short of 'and then she woke up', right? Or is that what you're planning next episode as we push the tandem-story envelope? Cool nude-hairbrushing scene, by the way. I assume it's her butt that the pillow's caressing? She's a thoughtful one, isn't she? Shame about the hair knot. That could wreck a person's whole day. - Joel

I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat.

Eric dubbed his pranks “the missions.” As they got under way, he ruminated about misfit geniuses in American society. He didn’t like what he saw. Eric was a voracious reader, and he had just gobbled up John Steinbeck’s The Pastures of Heaven, which includes a fable about the idiot savant Tularecito. The young boy had extraordinary gifts that allowed him to see a world his peers couldn’t even imagine—exactly how Eric was coming to view himself, though without Tularecito’s mental shortcomings. Tularecito’s peers failed to see his gifts and treated him badly. Tularecito struck back violently, killing one of his antagonists. He was imprisoned for life in an insane asylum. Eric did not approve. “Tularecito did not deserve to be put away,” he wrote in a book report. “He just needed to be taught to control his anger. Society needs to treat extremely talented people like Tularecito much better.” All they needed was more time, Eric argued—gifted misfits could be taught what was right and wrong, what was acceptable to society. “Love and care is the only way,” he said.

Howard thought, Is it not true: A move of the head, a step to the left or right, and we change from wise, decent, loyal people to conceited fools? Light changes, our eyes blink and see the world from the slightest difference of perspective and our place in it has changed infinitely: Sun catches cheap plate flaking--I am a tinker; the moon is an egg glowing in its nest of leafless trees--I am a poet; a brochure for an asylum is on the dresser--I am an epileptic, insane; the house is behind me--I am a fugitive. His despair had not come from the fact that he was a fool; he knew he was a fool. The despair came from the fact that his wife saw him as a fool, as a useless tinker, a copier of bad verses from two-penny religious magazines, an epileptic, and could find no reason to turn her head and see him as something better.

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 in the dragnet. In strictness we are all mad when we give way to passion, to prejudice, to vice, to vanity; but if all the passionate, prejudiced and vain people were to be locked up as lunatics, who is to keep the key to the asylum?" (Editorial, The Times, 22 July 1853)

Minor wants desperately to know that he is being helpful. He wants to feel involved. He wants, but knows he can never demand, that praise be showered on him. He wants respectability, and he wants those in the asylum to know that he is special, different from others in their cells. Though

Luna Hills Trans Asylum. There was something extra creepy about giving a fucked up place a sane, serene name to play down the reality. Why not just call it Sanitarium For The Bat Shit Crazy, or Forgotten Hope Mental Ward? Because they didn’t name these places to impress the insane, that’s why.

Espero ese día. Espero con ansias el día en que voy a estar sonriendo desde el Cielo, preguntándome lo que hizo a mi papá ser tan enfermo, retorcido y podrido. Espero con interés el día en que lo pueda perdonar por todo lo que ha hecho y verlo desde una nube en el cielo, rezando por su alma condenada, mientras que él está bañado en llamas, y quemándose en el infierno.

Everything was perfectly swell. There were no prisons, no slums, no insane asylums, no cripples, no poverty, no wars. All diseases were conquered. So was old age. Death, barring accidents, was an adventure for volunteers. The population of the United States was stabilized at forty-million souls.

I believe at least in one of the chief tenets of the Christian faith--contentment with a lowly place. I am a doctor and I know that ambition--the desire to succeed--to have power--leads to most ills of the human soul. If the desire is realized it leads to arrogance, violence and final satiety; and if it is denied--ah! if it is denied--let all the asylums for the insane rise up and give their testimony! The are filled with human beings who were unable to face being mediocre, insignificant, ineffective and who therefore created for themselves ways of escape from reality so to be shut off from life itself forever.

The most dangerous thing of all, and something he wanted to warn me about above all else, the one thing that had consigned whole regiments of unfortunate young people to the twilight world of insanity, was reading books. This objectionable practice had increased among the younger generation, and Dad was more pleased than the could say to not that I had not yet displayed any such tendencies. Lunatic asylums were overflowing with folk who'd been reading too much. Once upon a time they'd been just like you and me, physically strong, straightforward, cheerful, and well balanced. Then they'd started reading. Most often by chance. A bout of flu perhaps, with a few days in bed. An attractive book cover that had aroused some curiosity. And suddenly the bad habit had taken hold. The first book had led to another. Then another, and another, all links in a chain that led straight down into the eternal night of mental illness. It was impossible to stop. It was worse than drugs. It might just be possible, if you were very careful, to look at the occasional book that could teach you something, such as encyclopedias or repair manuals. The most dangerous kind of book was fiction-- that's where all the brooding was sparked and encouraged. Damnit all! Addictive and risky products like that should only be available in state-regulated monopoly stores, rationed and sold only to those with a license, and mature in age.

Hopkins was one of the top hospitals in the country. It was built in 1889 as a charity hospital for the sick and poor, and it covered more than a dozen acres where a cemetery and insane asylum once sat in East Baltimore. The public wards at Hopkins were filled with patients, most of them black and unable to pay their medical bills. David drove Henrietta nearly twenty miles to get there, not because they preferred it, but because it was the only major hospital for miles that treated black patients. This was the era of Jim Crow—when black people showed up at white-only hospitals, the staff was likely to send them away, even if it meant they might die in the parking lot. Even Hopkins, which did treat black patients, segregated them in colored wards, and had colored-only fountains. So when the nurse called Henrietta from the waiting room, she led her through a single door to a colored-only exam room—one in a long row of rooms divided by clear glass walls that let nurses see from one to the next.

The funny thing about mental hospitals is that they strip away any remaining reason you have to live, but deny you the means to do anything about it. It is fascinating to me that a suicide attempt, by default, legally lands you into the asylum, the psych ward, the loony bin, the nut house—call it what you will, it’s all the same. Perhaps you are crazy, perhaps you are not, but I do not believe that, in itself alone, attempting suicide proves anything at all about your mental state, save that, upon weighing the merits of living and dying, you found that one outweighed the other. Is this crazy? I see nothing insane about it at all. Socially unacceptable to be sure, but not mad.

When I arrived at Oakhill, I didn't think I was that far gone. I didn't think that the screw inside my head was that loose. But it is. And there isn't a screwdriver around anywhere to tighten it. I’m sure I had all my screws when I came here. But this place… This place will take things from you. This place makes the sane people crazy and the slightly crazy people insane. I start questioning myself. I start repeating, Is that what happened to me?

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche

How could I be sure that I was not insane? I did not feel mad, but how was I to know what madness felt like?

This typewriter has spent its whole life up to now in an insane asylum,” the lady told us. “It’s going to the right person,” I replied.

Wisdom is in the insane asylums. The end is in the everyday-pale smiles

He said that we had forgotten the clowns, who now performed only in prisons and insane asylums. The implication was that this was a bad thing.

Yes, we are in a real pickle. Welcome to the pan-galactic insane asylum.

I stick my tongue out at it. Ugh. I should be committed to an insane asylum. At least I’m not talking to a volley ball.

Sometimes it seems that the world is a very, very, large, insane asylum. We need only not get caught in others’ madness and stick to our own.

You belong in an insane asylum, you know that?" "Maybe my next case...

And another patient went further: “INSANE ASYLUM. A place where insanity is made.”23

For if there were no schools to take our children away, the insane asylums would be filled with mothers,

The problem, naturally, was the entrenched perspective that all who had been committed to the asylum must be insane, and that any patient who protested her sanity was sicker than the rest.

You try too hard to make life fit your way of doing things. If you don't want to spend time in an insane asylum, you have to open up a little more and let yourself go with life's natural flow.

Czechoslovakia spoke of “normalization,” which nicely caught the spirit of the moment. What was, was normal. To say otherwise in Brezhnev’s Soviet Union was to be condemned to an insane asylum.

Durante mucho tiempo me sentí como si estuviera vagando sin rumbo por la vida. La única cosa que podía esperar era mis paseos en la mañana y los sueños de salir por mi cuenta. Entonces Damien llegó.

You try too hard to make life fit your way of doing things. If you don’t want to spend time in an insane asylum, you have to open up a little more and let yourself go with life’s natural flow. I’m just a powerless and imperfect woman, but still there are times when I think to myself how wonderful life can be! Believe me, it’s true! So stop what you’re doing this minute and get happy. Work at making yourself happy!

Sometimes I think Earth has got to be the insane asylum of the universe. . . and I'm here by computer error. At sixty-eight, I hope I've gained some wisdom in the past fourteen lustrums and it’s obligatory to speak plain and true about the conclusions I've come to; now that I have been educated to believe by such mentors as Wells, Stapledon, Heinlein, van Vogt, Clarke, Pohl, (S. Fowler) Wright, Orwell, Taine, Temple, Gernsback, Campbell and other seminal influences in scientifiction, I regret the lack of any female writers but only Radclyffe Hall opened my eyes outside sci-fi. I was a secular humanist before I knew the term. I have not believed in God since childhood's end. I believe a belief in any deity is adolescent, shameful and dangerous. How would you feel, surrounded by billions of human beings taking Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the tooth fairy and the stork seriously, and capable of shaming, maiming or murdering in their name? I am embarrassed to live in a world retaining any faith in church, prayer or a celestial creator. I do not believe in Heaven, Hell or a Hereafter; in angels, demons, ghosts, goblins, the Devil, vampires, ghouls, zombies, witches, warlocks, UFOs or other delusions; and in very few mundane individuals--politicians, lawyers, judges, priests, militarists, censors and just plain people. I respect the individual's right to abortion, suicide and euthanasia. I support birth control. I wish to Good that society were rid of smoking, drinking and drugs. My hope for humanity - and I think sensible science fiction has a beneficial influence in this direction - is that one day everyone born will be whole in body and brain, will live a long life free from physical and emotional pain, will participate in a fulfilling way in their contribution to existence, will enjoy true love and friendship, will pity us 20th century barbarians who lived and died in an atrocious, anachronistic atmosphere of arson, rape, robbery, kidnapping, child abuse, insanity, murder, terrorism, war, smog, pollution, starvation and the other negative “norms” of our current civilization. I have devoted my life to amassing over a quarter million pieces of sf and fantasy as a present to posterity and I hope to be remembered as an altruist who would have been an accepted citizen of Utopia.

Letters found on the Japanese dead in the crater described us as monsters. “The Americans on this island are not ordinary troops, but Marines, a special force recruited from jails and insane asylums for bloodlust.

All Mad" 'He is mad as a hare, poor fellow, And should be in chains,' you say, I haven't a doubt of your statement, But who isn't mad, I pray? Why, the world is a great asylum, And the people are all insane, Gone daft with pleasure or folly, Or crazed with passion and pain. The infant who shrieks at a shadow, The child with his Santa Claus faith, The woman who worships Dame Fashion, Each man with his notions of death, The miser who hoards up his earnings, The spendthrift who wastes them too soon, The scholar grown blind in his delving, The lover who stares at the moon. The poet who thinks life a paean, The cynic who thinks it a fraud, The youth who goes seeking for pleasure, The preacher who dares talk of God, All priests with their creeds and their croaking, All doubters who dare to deny, The gay who find aught to wake laughter, The sad who find aught worth a sigh, Whoever is downcast or solemn, Whoever is gleeful and gay, Are only the dupes of delusions— We are all of us—all of us mad.

Wasn't this rugged business of taking your life apart, looking at all of it and admitting and remembering and reminding yourself of all the bad - wasn't the big result of it your getting to be honest? "Exactly that," said Ferguson.

In the first two decades of the twentieth century, experts advised men to have their kitchens painted apple-green. The experts believed that apple-green quieted nervous people, and especially wives beginning to think of suffrage, of careers beyond the home. Today the explorer of color schemes finds in old houses and apartments the apple-green paint still gracing the inside of the cabinet under the kitchen sink, and the hallways of old police stations and insane asylums.

Insane asylums were filled with test subjects who were forced to take cocaine, manganese, and castor oil; injected with animal blood and oil of turpentine; and gassed with carbon dioxide or concentrated oxygen (the so-called “gas cure”).

Things will go where they’re supposed to go if you just let them take their natural course. Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it’s time for them to be hurt. Life is like that. I know I sound like I’m preaching from a pulpit, but it’s about time you learned to live like this. You try too hard to make life fit your way of doing things. If you don’t want to spend time in an insane asylum, you have to open up a little more and let yourself go with life’s natural flow.

Esto está matándome. Tiene muchas cosas que hacer por delante y si se queda 33 conmigo, lo seguiré arrastrando hacia abajo. Soy como un remolino en medio de un mar agitado, una vez que estás en mi camino no tengo elección, te agarraré de la pierna y te hundiré.

This was his third attempt to escape Yugoslavia, for which he was rewarded by two years of treatment in the insane asylum. The official political reasoning was simple: if you wanted to leave a healthy society like socialist Yugoslavia to live in the decadent West, you were insane.

If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov, who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years, had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed with iron rings; that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the ‘secret brand’); that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums.

—¿Addy? —Hay un tono ronco en su voz y cierro mis ojos con él. Juro que puedo ver la profundidad de su alma. —¿Si? —Quiero que sepas algo. —Está bien. Él ladea su cabeza, me da un suave beso en los labios. —Solo quiero que sepas que eres mi sol, mi luna y mis estrellas. Mi cielo, mi infierno y mi tierra. Haría cualquier cosa por ti. Iría a cualquier sitio por ti. Si alguna vez me dejas, te seguiré. —Nunca tendrás que seguirme porque nunca te voy a dejar. El amor por él quema dentro de mí como una vela romana. Las llamas son vibrantes, ardientes, y el humo que despliega de la punta es sofocante. Y a pesar de que siento que no puedo respirar, si esta es la forma en que Damien me hace sentir, espero no volver a respirar.

One of them hasn't got a uniform on or plainclothes either like the rest. He has on the white coat that is my nightmare and my horror. And in the crotch of one arm he is upending two long poles intertwined with canvas. The long-drawn-out death within life. The burial-alive of the mind, covering it over with fresh graveyard earth each time it tries to struggle through to the light. In this kind of death you never finish dying. ("New York Blues")

Like an unblemished golden jar, our glorious National Essence stands upon a foundation of belief in the family. We need to ask, then, how grave the responsibilities of the head of any one family might be. Does the head of a family have the right to go mad any time he feels like it? To this question we must offer a resounding "No!". Imagine what would happen if the husbands of the world suddenly acquired the right to go mad. All, without exception, would leave their families behind for a happy life of song on the road, or wandering over hill and dale, or being kept well fed and clothed in an insane asylum.

I was never attracted to big things―convertible Porsche's, mansions, fame, and money. I always found those things to be repulsive and energy-draining. Give me the gutters, the junkyards, the bars, the liquor stores, the grimy graffiti-ridden back alleys, the insane asylums, the pimps, the hookers, the preachers, the old, the drunkards, the junkies, the homeless, the madmen, and the madwomen. Wherever the ghetto is, that's where life is. It doesn't matter where you live, United States, United Kingdom, Sweden, you won't find a liveliness like in the ghetto anywhere else. They're the things that refill my energy tank and keep me going. Anything out of that realm is just plain, dull, and boring. Give me the cheap and effortless lifestyle. The factory job, the small one-bedroom apartments, the whores, the Budweiser six-packs, the hand-rolled cigarettes, the Tom Waits vinyls, and the old vintage typewriters. I'll be alright.

Young Helwig was in good standing as a member of the Hitler Youth and at the garden school and he did well everywhere. He was a strong, honest, handy boy. He was sure the men who were imprisoned in the Westhofen concentration camp belonged in that place just as much as crazy people belonged in an insane asylum.

Really, old chap," he said, "I don't mean to run down a man you like, but for the life of me I can't see what the deuce you find in common with Mr. Wilde. He's not well bred, to put it generously; he is hideously deformed; his head is the head of a criminally insane person. You know yourself he's been in an asylum—

A man described by authorities as one evolutionary step above a banana slug has recently admitted to having been locked in the Sacajawea Junior High biology lab over a long weekend nearly sixteen years ago when he fell asleep and was mistaken as a cadaver. Though the man is incapable of human speech, he was able, over a period of weeks, to chisel out his story in hieroglyphics on the bathroom wall of the insane asylum where he now resides. He claims that toward the end of the second day of his accidental captivity, he got downright lonely and sought companionship at his own intellectual level. He found that companionship in a petri dish.

Thank you,” I said. I was sorry she’d told me; I still wanted to believe that what they called a good marriage had remained possible, for someone. But it was kind of her, thoughtful; I knew in her place I wouldn’t have done it, I would have let her take care of herself, My Brother’s Keeper always reminded me of zoos and insane asylums.

He llegado a la desgarradora conclusión de que Damien es demasiado bueno para alguien como yo. Él es brillante, guapo e inteligente y va a tener una vida asombrosa, muy, muy lejos de aquí, y muy, muy lejos de mí. Encontrará a una chica encantadora en la universidad. Se casarán. Tendrán una docena de hermosos bebés. Y serán la pareja envidiada que todo el mundo mira cuando imaginan como deben ser el amor y la felicidad. Serán la imagen de la perfección. Damien se merece eso. Se merece toda la maravillosa e incandescente felicidad del mundo. Y hay una sensación de malestar, que gira alrededor de mi interior, que me hace saber que él nunca encontrará ese tipo de felicidad conmigo.

It will go down someday as the greatest reality show ever conceived. The concept is ingenious. Take a combustible mix of the most depraved and filterless half-wits, scam artists and asylum Napoleons America has to offer, give them all piles of money and tell them to run for president. Add Donald Trump. And to give the whole thing a perverse gravitas, make the presidency really at stake. It’s Western civilization’s very own car wreck. Even if you don’t want to watch it, you will. It’s that awesome of a spectacle. But

We went back into the Mens Apartments where there were others raving of Ships that may fly and silvered Creatures upon the Moon: Their Stories seem to have neither Head nor Tayl to them, Sir Chris. told me, but there is a Grammar in them if I could but Puzzle it out. This is a mad Age, I replied, and there are many fitter for Bedlam than these here confin'd to a Chain or a dark Room. A sad Reflection, Nick. And what little Purpose have we to glory in our Reason, I continu'd, when the Brain may so suddenly be disorder'd?

Chart showing the supposed causes of insanity in those admitted to the Jacksonville asylum—including three patients admitted for “novel reading

In the land of the crazies, we are all sane.

Incarceration seems to have been obtained in consequence of Mrs. Packard using her reason and, not as reported, by her losing her reason.

You don’t have to visit an asylum to see insanity. All you have to do is visit Washington DC.

You can’t have an objective view of the larger picture and go insane - that’s what I’ll believe. The two are mutually exclusive.

Old age realizes the dreams of youth: look at Dean Swift; in his youth he built an asylum for the insane, in his old age he was himself an inmate.

Jack asked himself: Would he have wanted to live out his life as a placid, contented, lobotomized Ferdinand the Bull? No. Then, what right did he have to inflict such a fate on anybody?

What was there about us, in Belize [asylum], so different from the girls playing bridge and gossiping and studying in college to which I would return? Those girls, too, sat under bell jars of a sort.

I think more people would stay active in church, if they didn't get so offended by the actions of members. Sometimes, you have to view places of worship as free mental health clinics, in order to deal with the piety or hypocrisy. Parishioners are a wounded souls in various stages of healing, who are being treated by angels, with credentials from the University of Hard Knocks. Some take their therapy seriously and try to practice what they learned. Yet, others down the sacrament like a healing dose of Prozac, with no other effort required. When you keep this in mind, you won't feel so annoyed by the personalities you encounter.

A despatch from California describes a theosophist colony as donning white robes en masse for some “glorious fulfilment” which never arrives, whilst items from India speak guardedly of serious native unrest toward the end of March. Voodoo orgies multiply in Hayti, and African outposts report ominous mutterings. American officers in the Philippines find certain tribes bothersome about this time, and New York policemen are mobbed by hysterical Levantines on the night of March 22–23. The west of Ireland, too, is full of wild rumour and legendry, and a fantastic painter named Ardois-Bonnot hangs a blasphemous “Dream Landscape” in the Paris spring salon of 1926. And so numerous are the recorded troubles in insane asylums, that only a miracle can have stopped the medical fraternity from noting strange parallelisms and drawing mystified conclusions.

The pressures and brutalities of society had pushed them all in this direction - perhaps it was society itself that was insane, and these poor men and women were merely the most unfortunate victims of that derangement.

But here was a woman taken without her own consent from the free world to an asylum and there given no chance to prove her sanity. Confined most probably for life behind asylum bars, without even being told in her language the why and wherefore. Compare this with a criminal, who is given every chance to prove his innocence. Who would not rather be a murderer and take the chance for life than be declared insane, without hope of escape?

Barbee had wondered about insanity, sometimes with a brooding dread - for his own father, whom he scarcely remembered, had died in the forbidding stone pile of the state asylum. He had vaguely supposed that a mental breakdown must be somehow strange and thrilling, with an exciting conflict of horrible depression and wild elation. But perhaps it was more often like this, just a baffled apathetic retreat from problems grown too difficult to solve.

This Insane Asylum has been to me the gate to Heaven,”25 she later wrote—because it had brought her to this rebirth and to what she saw as her new divine mission. “For woman’s sake I suffer [here],” she scribbled in her journal. “I will try to continue to suffer on, patiently and uncomplainingly, confidently hoping that my case will lead [the] community to investigate for themselves, and see why it is, that so many sane women are thus persecuted.

The agonies that he must have suffered in those terrible asylum nights have granted us all a benefit, for all time. He was mad, and for that, we have reason to be glad. A truly savage irony, on which it is discomfiting to dwell.

Half the people in our asylums may be suffering from a physical lesion of the brain but the others are unaccountably insane. The real reason is demoniac possession brought about by looking upon terrible things that they were never meant to see.

To the men and women who changed Cheryl Hersha's life, she was a continuation of the research that had first been conducted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Dr. Morton Prince. He encountered a woman named Miss Beauchamp, a nursing student who was referred to the psychiatrist because of health problems. As he worked with her, Prince discovered that she had four separate personalities (dissociated ego states) that existed independently of one another within the same body. Though he tried, Dr. Prince never understood Miss Beauchamp, nor was he able to help her. When he died, his wife had the woman committed to an insane asylum for the rest of her life. However, Prince's careful documentation of Beauchamp's symptoms, actions and family history (extreme child abuse beginning before the age of seven) provided information needed to develop the techniques for contemporary, routinely successful treatment of what would be called Multiple Personality Disorder.

There’s a part of me wishes that Daddy would sleep his life away. A part of me that hopes that after all these years his drinking will finally catch up to him. That one day he’ll just go to bed and never wake up. But who am I kidding with that dream? It’s the people like Daddy, the wicked ones who go on living forever. It’s like God puts people like Daddy on earth on purpose. Making them a test for the good people in the world. If you can withstand what the good Lord throws at you, by staying true to your goodhearted self, and persevering through all of the obstacles thrust before you, then you’ve earned a spot by his side in Heaven. I look forward to that day. I look forward to the day where I’ll be smiling down from Heaven, wondering what made my daddy become so sick, twisted, and rotten. I look forward to the day when I can forgive him for everything he’s done and watch him from a cloud up in Heaven, praying for his damned soul, while he’s doused in flames, and burning in hell.

In his 1973 “literary investigation,” The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn exposed the practices of the Soviet penal system: “If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings, that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the ‘secret brand’); that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums.

MAD, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence; not conforming to standards of thought, speech and action derived by the conformants from study of themselves; at odds with the majority; in short, unusual. It is noteworthy that persons are pronounced mad by officials destitute of evidence that themselves are sane. For illustration, this present (and illustrious) lexicographer is no firmer in the faith of his own sanity than is any inmate of any madhouse in the land; yet for aught he knows to the contrary, instead of the lofty occupation that seems to him to be engaging his powers he may really be beating his hands against the window bars of an asylum and declaring himself Noah Webster, to the innocent delight of many thoughtless spectators.

Every human creature is a terror to every other human creature. Human minds are like unknown planets, encountering and colliding. Every one of them contains jagged precipices, splintered rock-peaks, ghastly crevasses, smouldering volcanoes, scorched and scorching deserts, blistering sands, evil dungeons from behind whose barred windows mad and terrible faces peer out. Every pair of human eyes is a custom-house gate into a completely foreign port; a port whose palaces and slums, whose insane asylums and hospitals, whose market-places and sacred shrines represent the terrifying and the menacing as well as the promising and the pleasure-giving! But when once any small group of persons has been together for any reasonable length of time the official warders of these custom-house gates are withdrawn. Each individual in such a group feels he can wander freely through the purlieus of these other enclosed fortresses! He does not necessarily move a step. The point is that the gates into the unknown streets no longer bristle with bayonets, are no longer thronged with “dreadful faces” and “fiery arms.

For similar reasons, one common cause of committal to an asylum in Elizabeth’s time was “novel reading.”9 Doctors believed that those who indulged in this “pernicious habit”10 lived “a dreamy kind of existence, so nearly allied to insanity that the slightest exciting cause is sufficient to derange.”11 No wonder Theophilus and his co-pastor had tried to shut down the first public library that opened in Shelburne, Massachusetts. It was introducing “improper literature,”12 and the preachers did not believe that churchgoers should risk their souls—or indeed their minds.

Contrary to what you may think, the legal system was neither founded upon nor designed to reflect the common decency found in normal human relationships. It primarily works like the rules for a lunatic asylum. It tries to govern people driven insane by the inflated idea of their own worth.

Insane asylums are deliberate and premeditated receptacles of black magic, and it is not only that doctors encourage magic with their untimely and hybrid therapies, it is that they practice it. If there had been no doctors there would never have been patients, no skeletons of the diseased dead to butcher and flay, for it is through doctors and not through patients that society began. Those who live, live off the dead. And it is likewise necessary that death live; and there is nothing like an insane asylum for calmly incubating death, and for keeping dead people in incubators.

Our perhaps understandable modern need to full the sawtooth edges of so many of the afflictions we are heir to has led us to banish the harsh old-fashioned words: madhouse, asylum, insanity, melancholia, lunatic, madness. But never let it be doubted that depression, it its extreme form, is madness.

She had been concerned before about the lack of treatment for those who were genuinely mentally ill. But this course he had now prescribed went the other way. As one patient put it, most of the doctors that are employed in lunatic asylums do much more to aggravate the disease than they do to cure it.

It's true,' replied Doris with a sniff in Bessy's direction to make her sensible of a victory, even if a minor one. 'It is amazing how so many people go insane. One day a man is a normal, friendly husband and the next he suddenly becomes a raging schizoid and slays his wife and himself as well. The result of what cause? Why, perhaps he chanced to find some schoolgirl treasure of another beau who had been his greatest rival and is stunned to discover that she secretly retains this. But usually the matter is not so simple, you know. Next to nothing may happen, jarring awake some sleeping monstrosity in a man's complex mental machinery and turning him from a sane person to a mentally sick individual. It is wholly impossible to say when a man is sane, for' -she tittered- 'scarce one of us is normal.' 'You mean - it might happen to any of us?' 'Of course,' said Doris, charmed by all this interest. 'One moment we are seated here, behaving normally and the next some tiny thing, a certain voice, a certain combination of thoughts may throw out the balance wheel of our intellects and we become potential inmates for asylums the rest of our lives. No, not one of us knows when the world will cease to be a normal, ordinary place. You know, no one ever knows when he goes insane: He supposes it is the world altering, not himself. Rooms become peopled with strange shapes and beings, sounds distort themselves into awful cries and, poof! we are judged insane.' 'Poof -' said Jacob, feeling weak and ill. ("He Didn't Like Cats")

As a pauper, the obvious destination for James Tilly Matthews was the Bethlem Hospital, already long known in popular slang as Bedlam. The principal public asylum in London, it had accepted dangerous and insane paupers as 'objects of charity' for centuries, and was proud of the claim that it had never turned anyone away.

SINCE my experiences in Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum were published in the World I have received hundreds of letters in regard to it. The edition containing my story long since ran out, and I have been prevailed upon to allow it to be published in book form, to satisfy the hundreds who are yet asking for copies. I am happy to be able to state as a result of my visit to the asylum and the exposures consequent thereon, that the City of New York has appropriated $1,000,000 more per annum than ever before for the care of the insane. So, I have at least the satisfaction of knowing that the poor unfortunates will be the better cared for because of my work.

Clennon King, a black student who applied to the University of Mississippi in 1958, was forcefully committed to a mental asylum. The presiding judge ruled that a black person must surely be insane to think that he could be admitted to the University of Mississippi. The vicious circle: a chance historical situation is translated into a rigid social system.

There was a period when I lived on book reviews, when I had basked and drawn sustenance from what I deemed the light of their intelligence, the beneficience of their charm. But something had gone sour. Over the years I had read too much, in dim-lighted railway stations, lying on the davenports of strangers' houses, in the bleak and dismal wards of insane asylums. That reading had forced the charm to relinquish itself. Now I found that reviews were not only bland but scarcely, if ever, relevant; and that all books, whether works of imagination or the blatant frauds of literary whores, were approached by the reviewer with the same crushing sobriety. I wanted to reviewer to be fair, kind, and funny. I wanted to be made to laugh.

You may say that the serious writer doesn't have to bother about the tired reader, but he does, because they are all tired. One old lady who wants her heart lifted up wouldn't be so bad, but you multiply her two hundred and fifty thousand times and what you get is a book club. I used to think it should be possible to write for some supposed elite, for the people who attend universities and sometimes know how to read, but I have since found that though you may publish your stories in Botteghe Oscure, if they are any good at all, you are eventually going to get a letter from some old lady in California, or some inmate of the Federal Penitentiary or the state insane asylum or the local poorhouse, telling you where you have failed to meet his needs.

Barbee had always wondered about mental institutions. He thought of taking notes for a feature story on this adventure at Glennhaven, as the evening wore on, began to seem remarkable for utter lack of anything noteworthy. It began to appear as a fragile never-never land, populated with timid souls in continual retreat from the real world outside and even from one another within.

By the mid-twentieth century, segregation in the former Confederate states was probably worse than in the late nineteenth century. Clennon King, a black student who applied to the University of Mississippi in 1958, was forcefully committed to a mental asylum. The presiding judge ruled that a black person must surely be insane to think that he could be admitted to the University of Mississippi.

Dissociation of the mind into logic-tight compartments is by no means confined to the population of the asylum. It is a common, and perhaps inevitable, occurrence in the psychology of every human being. Our political convictions are notoriously inaccessible to argument, and we preserve the traditional beliefs of our childhood in spite of the contradictory facts constantly presented by our experience.

Howard though, Is it not true: A move of the head, a step to the left or right, and we change from wise, decent, loyal people to conceited fools? Light changes, our eyes blink and see the world from the slightest difference of perspective and our place in it has changed infinitely: Sun catches cheap plate flaking- I am a tinker; the moon is an egg glowing in its nest of leafless trees- I am a poet; a brochure for an asylum is on the dresser; I am an epileptic, insane; the house is behind me- I am a fugitive. His despair had not come from the fact that he was a fool; he knew he was a fool. His despair came from the fact that his wife saw him as a fool, as a useless tinker, a copier of bad verse from two-penny religous magazines, an epileptic, and could find no reason to turn her head and see him as something better.

The bearing of all this on the question of premeditation [and premeditation will imply sanity] is very obvious. You must not allow any considerations of age or temptation to weigh with you in the finding of your verdict. Before you can come to a verdict of guilty but insane you must be well and thoroughly convinced that the condition of his mind was such as would have qualified him at the moment for a lunatic asylum.

I am a man in death. I am not God. I am not man. I am a beast and a predator. I want to make love to prostitutes. I want to live like an unnecessary man. I know that God wants this, and therefore I will live that way. I will live that way until He stops me. I will gamble on the Stock Exchange because I want to do so at other people's expense. I am an evil man. I do not love anyone. I wish harm to everyone and good to myself. I am an egoist. I am not God. I am a beast, a predator. I will practice masturbation and spiritualism. I will eat everyone I can get hold of. I will stop at nothing. I will make love to my wife's mother and my child. I will weep, but I will do everything God commands me to. I know that everyone will be afraid of me and will commit me to a lunatic asylum. But I don't care. I am not afraid of anything. I want death. I will blow my brains out if God wants it.

Quality is the response of an organism to its environment’ [he used this example because his chief questioners seemed to see things in terms of stimulus-response behavior theory]. An amoeba, placed on a plate of water with a drip of dilute sulfuric acid placed nearby, will pull away from the acid (I think). If it could speak the amoeba, without knowing anything about sulfuric acid, could say, ‘This environment has poor quality.’ If it had a nervous system it would act in a much more complex way to overcome the poor quality of the environment. It would seek analogues, that is, images and symbols from its previous experience, to define the unpleasant nature of its new environment and thus ‘understand’ it. “In our highly complex organic state we advanced organisms respond to our environment with an invention of many marvelous analogues. We invent earth and heavens, trees, stones and oceans, gods, music, arts, language, philosophy, engineering, civilization and science. We call these analogues reality. And they are reality. We mesmerize our children in the name of truth into knowing that they are reality. We throw anyone who does not accept these analogues into an insane asylum. But that which causes us to invent the analogues is Quality. Quality is the continuing stimulus which our environment puts upon us to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it. “Now, to take that which has caused us to create the world, and include it within the world we have created, is clearly impossible. That is why Quality cannot be defined. If we do define it we are defining something less than Quality itself.” I remember this fragment more vividly than any of the others, possibly because it is the most important of all. When he wrote it he felt momentary fright and was about to strike out the words “All of it.

Beth summoned the courage to look straight into Hart’s golden eyes. “Can you not consider that perhaps I fell in love with him?” Deeply, dramatically, foolishly in love. “No.” “Why not?” art drew a breath but didn’t speak. A muscle twitched in his jaw. “I see,” Beth said softly. “You believe he’s mad, and you don’t think any woman could love that.” “Ian is mad. The commission of lunacy proved it. I was there. I saw.” “Then why not leave him in the asylum if you think he’s insane?” “Because I know what they did to him.” In the gentle twilight the powerful Duke of Kilmorgan looked suddenly haunted. “I saw what the damn quacks did. If he hadn’t been mad when he went in, the place would have driven him so.”.........Hart flicked his gaze away, but not before Beth saw the moisture in his eyes. ..... The breeze of the dying afternoon stirred his hair, tugged at the curls on Beth’s forehead. She watched as one of the highest dukes in the land blinked away tears.

The “moral treatment,” as it came to be known, became the solution: rather than chained and forgotten, patients would be unshackled and allowed to move about the asylum at will. Instead of being tortured and imprisoned, patients would work and play. Through labor and sports, hobbies and other recreations, the moral treatment promised rehabilitation and freedom from insanity. The moral model was held out as a means of actually curing patients, rather than simply bundling them out of sight.

Juliette. A girl with a lethal touch that saps the strength and energy of human beings until they’re limp, paralyzed carcasses wheezing on the floor. A girl who spent most of her life in hospitals and juvenile detention centers, a girl who was cast off by her own parents, labeled as certifiably insane, and sentenced to isolation in an asylum where even the rats were afraid to live. A girl. So power hungry that she killed a small child. She tortured a toddler. She brought a grown man gasping to his knees. She doesn’t even have the decency to kill herself. None of it is a lie.

To the infra-human specimens of this benighted scientific age the ritual and worship connected with the art of healing as practiced at Epidaurus seems like sheer buncombe. In our world the blind lead the blind and the sick go to the sick to be cured. We are making constant progress, but it is a progress which leads to the operating table, to the poor house, to the insane asylum, to the trenches. We have no healers – we have only butchers whose knowledge of anatomy entitles them to a diploma, which in turn entitles them to carve out or amputate our illnesses so that we may carry on in cripple fashion until such time as we are fit for the slaughterhouse. We announce the discovery of this cure and that but make no mention of the new diseases which we have created en route. The medical cult operates very much like the war office – the triumphs which they broadcast are sops thrown out to conceal death and disaster. The medicos, like the military authorities, are helpless; they are waging a hopeless fight from the start. What man wants is peace in order that he may live. Defeating our neighbor doesn’t give peace any more than curing cancer brings health. Man doesn’t begin to live through triumphing over his enemy nor does he begin to acquire health through endless cures. The joy of life comes through peace, which is not static but dynamic. No man can really say that he knows what joy is until he has experienced peace. And without joy there is no life, even if you have a dozen cars, six butlers, a castle, a private chapel and a bomb-proof vault. Our diseases are our attachments, be they habits, ideologies, ideals, principles, possessions, phobias, gods, cults, religions, what you please. Good wages can be a disease just as much as bad wages. Leisure can be just as great a disease as work. Whatever we cling to, even if it be hope or faith, can be the disease which carries us off. Surrender is absolute: if you cling to even the tiniest crumb you nourish the germ which will devour you. As for clinging to God, God long ago abandoned us in order that we might realize the joy of attaining godhood through our own efforts. All this whimpering that is going on in the dark, this insistent, piteous plea for peace which will grow bigger as the pain and the misery increase, where is it to be found? Peace, do people imagine that it is something to cornered, like corn or wheat? Is it something which can be pounded upon and devoured, as with wolves fighting over a carcass? I hear people talking about peace and their faces are clouded with anger or with hatred or with scorn and disdain, with pride and arrogance. There are people who want to fight to bring about peace- the most deluded souls of all. There will be no peace until murder is eliminated from the heart and mind. Murder is the apex of the broad pyramid whose base is the self. That which stands will have to fall. Everything which man has fought for will have to be relinquished before he can begin to live as man. Up till now he has been a sick beast and even his divinity stinks. He is master of many worlds and in his own he is a slave. What rules the world is the heart, not the brain, in every realm our conquests bring only death. We have turned our backs on the one realm wherein freedom lies. At Epidaurus, in the stillness, in the great peace that came over me, I heard the heart of the world beat. I know what the cure is: it is to give up, to relinquish, to surrender, so that our little hearts may beat in unison with the great heart of the world.

It is now time to face the fact that English is a crazy language — the most loopy and wiggy of all tongues. In what other language do people drive in a parkway and park in a driveway? In what other language do people play at a recital and recite at a play? Why does night fall but never break and day break but never fall? Why is it that when we transport something by car, it’s called a shipment, but when we transport something by ship, it’s called cargo? Why does a man get a hernia and a woman a hysterectomy? Why do we pack suits in a garment bag and garments in a suitcase? Why do privates eat in the general mess and generals eat in the private mess? Why do we call it newsprint when it contains no printing but when we put print on it, we call it a newspaper? Why are people who ride motorcycles called bikers and people who ride bikes called cyclists? Why — in our crazy language — can your nose run and your feet smell?Language is like the air we breathe. It’s invisible, inescapable, indispensable, and we take it for granted. But, when we take the time to step back and listen to the sounds that escape from the holes in people’s faces and to explore the paradoxes and vagaries of English, we find that hot dogs can be cold, darkrooms can be lit, homework can be done in school, nightmares can take place in broad daylight while morning sickness and daydreaming can take place at night, tomboys are girls and midwives can be men, hours — especially happy hours and rush hours — often last longer than sixty minutes, quicksand works very slowly, boxing rings are square, silverware and glasses can be made of plastic and tablecloths of paper, most telephones are dialed by being punched (or pushed?), and most bathrooms don’t have any baths in them. In fact, a dog can go to the bathroom under a tree —no bath, no room; it’s still going to the bathroom. And doesn’t it seem a little bizarre that we go to the bathroom in order to go to the bathroom? Why is it that a woman can man a station but a man can’t woman one, that a man can father a movement but a woman can’t mother one, and that a king rules a kingdom but a queen doesn’t rule a queendom? How did all those Renaissance men reproduce when there don’t seem to have been any Renaissance women? Sometimes you have to believe that all English speakers should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane: In what other language do they call the third hand on the clock the second hand? Why do they call them apartments when they’re all together? Why do we call them buildings, when they’re already built? Why it is called a TV set when you get only one? Why is phonetic not spelled phonetically? Why is it so hard to remember how to spell mnemonic? Why doesn’t onomatopoeia sound like what it is? Why is the word abbreviation so long? Why is diminutive so undiminutive? Why does the word monosyllabic consist of five syllables? Why is there no synonym for synonym or thesaurus? And why, pray tell, does lisp have an s in it? If adults commit adultery, do infants commit infantry? If olive oil is made from olives, what do they make baby oil from? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian consume? If pro and con are opposites, is congress the opposite of progress? ...

Anyone who has lived for a long while in an insane asylum where a good number and variety of individuals and children are confined will have in memory the full spectrum of ritual stances from the various religions, present and past, as if brought to their culmination. Some see a parody here, since the individuals in question are insane. And for an autistic child, the act of placing one’s hand on a hot stove, without the reflex to withdraw it, can make one think that feeling can be interrupted. Another individual, growing up, hands joined, gazing at the sky: one would think he had come straight from a painting evoking some mystic from the days of old. There are strange coincidences here, consistent enough for the insoluble problem of form and content to be posed. So here we have gestural forms that appear to have no content. Is this possible? It seems more reasonable to think that, for the same form, there can be several contents. We know of the rocking that often occurs in mute children, while in certain religions, perhaps most, prayer must be accompanied by rocking; mere language is in some way surpassed. Whereas for the children affected with what is often viewed as a symptom, it is a question of a vacancy of language. The same attitude corresponds to the same content, the same vacancy, the same lacuna, suffered by some and sought after by others.

The conversation went on. It was difficult for Shevek to follow, both in language and in substance. He was being told about things he had no experience of at all. He had never seen a rat, or an army barracks, or an insane asylum, or a poorhouse, or a pawnshop, or an execution, or a thief, or a tenement, or a rent collector, or a man who wanted to work and could not find work to do, or a dead baby in a ditch. All these things occurred in Efor's reminiscences as commonplaces or as commonplace horrors. Shevek had to exercise his imagination and summon every scrap of knowledge he had about Urras to understand them at all. And yet they were familiar to him in a way that nothing he had yet seen there was, and he did understand. This was the Urras he had learned about in school on Anarres. This was the world from which his ancestors had fled, preferring hunger and the desert and endless exile. This was the world that had formed Odo's mind and had jailed her eight times for speaking it. This was the human suffering in which the ideals of his society were rooted, the ground from which they sprang. It was not 'the real Urras.' The dignity and beauty of the room he and Efor were in was as real as the squalor to which Efor was native. To him a thinking man's job was not to deny one reality at the expense of the other, but to include and connect. It was not an easy job.

Rock and Roll adolescent hoodlums storm the streets of all nations. They rush into the Louvre and throw acid in the Mona Lisa's face. They open zoos, insane asylums, prisons, burst water mains with air hammers, chop the floor out of passenger plane lavatories, shoot out lighthouses, file elevator cables to one thin wire, turn sewers into the water supply, throw sharks and sting rays, electric eels and candiru into swimming pools (the candiru is a small eel-like fish or worm about one-quarter inch through and two inches long patronizing certain rivers of ill repute in the Greater Amazon Basin, will dart up your prick or your asshole or a woman's cunt faute de mieux, and hold himself there by sharp spines with precisely what motives is not known since no one has stepped forward to observe the candiru's life-cycle in situ), in nautical costumes ram the Queen Mary full speed into New York Harbor, play chicken with passenger planes and buses, rush into hospitals in white coats carrying saws and axes and scalpels three feet long, throw paralytics out of iron lungs (mimic their suffocations flopping about on the floor and rolling their eyes up), administer injections with bicycle pumps, disconnect artificial kidneys, saw a woman in half with a two-man surgical saw, they drive herds of squealing pigs into the Ka'bah, they shit on the floor of the United Nations and wipe their ass with treaties, pacts, alliances.

Out, in Henry’s view, is a madhouse. Historians of social lunacy will confirm that this is literally the case, that the mad have been let out of the asylums and allowed to walk the streets. But Henry doesn’t mean that. By mad, nerve-strung Henry means revving when you’re stationary and driving with your hand on your horn – read that sexually if you like, but Henry has in mind incessant honking – he means text messaging the person standing next to you, or being wired up so that you can speak into thin air, conversing with God is how it looks to Henry, or wearing running shoes when you’re not running, or coming up to Henry with a bad face and a dog on a piece of string and asking him for money. Why would Henry give someone with a bad face money? Because of the dog? Because of the string?

We tend to be unaware that stars rise and set at all. This is not entirely due to our living in cities ablaze with electric lights which reflect back at us from our fumes, smoke, and artificial haze. When I discussed the stars with a well-known naturalist, I was surprised to learn that even a man such as he, who has spent his entire lifetime observing wildlife and nature, was totally unaware of the movements of the stars. And he is no prisoner of smog-bound cities. He had no inkling, for instance, that the Little Bear could serve as a reliable night clock as it revolves in tight circles around the Pole Star (and acts as a celestial hour-hand at half speed - that is, it takes 24 hours rather than 12 for a single revolution). I wondered what could be wrong. Our modern civilization does not ignore the stars only because most of us can no longer see them. There are definitely deeper reasons. For even if we leave the sulphurous vapours of our Gomorrahs to venture into a natural landscape, the stars do not enter into any of our back-to-nature schemes. They simply have no place in our outlook any more. We look at them, our heads flung back in awe and wonder that they can exist in such profusion. But that is as far as it goes, except for the poets. This is simply a 'gee whiz' reaction. The rise in interest in astrology today does not result in much actual star-gazing. And as for the space programme's impact on our view of the sky, many people will attentively follow the motions of a visible satellite against a backdrop of stars whose positions are absolutely meaningless to them. The ancient mythological figures sketched in the sky were taught us as children to be quaint 'shepherds' fantasies' unworthy of the attention of adult minds. We are interested in the satellite because we made it, but the stars are alien and untouched by human hands - therefore vapid. To such a level has our technological mania, like a bacterial solution in which we have been stewed from birth, reduced us. It is only the integral part of the landscape which can relate to the stars. Man has ceased to be that. He inhabits a world which is more and more his own fantasy. Farmers relate to the skies, as well as sailors, camel caravans, and aerial navigators. For theirs are all integral functions involving the fundamental principle - now all but forgotten - of orientation. But in an almost totally secular and artificial world, orientation is thought to be un- necessary. And the numbers of people in insane asylums or living at home doped on tranquilizers testifies to our aimless, drifting metaphysic. And to our having forgotten orientation either to seasons (except to turn on the air- conditioning if we sweat or the heating system if we shiver) or to direction (our one token acceptance of cosmic direction being the wearing of sun-glasses because the sun is 'over there'). We have debased what was once the integral nature of life channelled by cosmic orientations - a wholeness - to the ennervated tepidity of skin sensations and retinal discomfort. Our interior body clocks, known as circadian rhythms, continue to operate inside us, but find no contact with the outside world. They therefore become ingrown and frustrated cycles which never interlock with our environment. We are causing ourselves to become meaningless body machines programmed to what looks, in its isolation, to be an arbitrary set of cycles. But by tearing ourselves from our context, like the still-beating heart ripped out of the body of an Aztec victim, we inevitably do violence to our psyches. I would call the new disease, with its side effect of 'alienation of the young', dementia temporalis.

If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings;1 that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath;2 that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the “secret brand”); that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums. Yes, not only Chekhov’s heroes, but what normal Russian at the beginning of the century, including any member of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, could have believed, would have tolerated, such a slander against the bright future? What had been acceptable under Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich in the seventeenth century, what had already been regarded as barbarism under Peter the Great, what might have been used against ten or twenty people in all during the time of Biron in the mid-eighteenth century, what had already become totally impossible under Catherine the Great, was all being practiced during the flowering of the glorious twentieth century—in a society based on socialist principles, and at a time when airplanes were flying and the radio and talking films had already appeared—not by one scoundrel alone in one secret place only, but by tens of thousands of specially trained human beasts standing over millions of defenseless victims. Was it only that explosion of atavism which is now evasively called “the cult of personality” that was so horrible?

The most productive nation in the world, yet unable to properly feed, clothe and shelter over a third of its population. Vast areas of valuable soil turning to waste land because of neglect, indifference, greed and vandalism. Torn some eighty years ago by the bloodiest civil war in the history of man and yet to this day unable to convince the defeated section of our country of the righteousness of our cause nor able, as liberators and emancipators of the slaves, to give them true freedom and equality, but instead enslaving and degrading our own white brothers. Yes, the industrial North defeated the aristocratic South—the fruits of that victory are now apparent. Wherever there is industry there is ugliness, misery, oppression, gloom and despair. The banks which grew rich by piously teaching us to save, in order to swindle us with our own money, now beg us not to bring our savings to them, threatening to wipe out even that ridiculous interest rate they now offer should we disregard their advice. Three-quarters of the world’s gold lies buried in Kentucky. Inventions which would throw millions more out of work, since by the queer irony of our system every potential boon to the human race is converted into an evil, lie idle on the shelves of the patent office or are bought up and destroyed by the powers that control our destiny. The land, thinly populated and producing in wasteful, haphazard way enormous surpluses of every kind, is deemed by its owners, a mere handful of men, unable to accommodate not only the starving millions of Europe but our own starving hordes. A country which makes itself ridiculous by sending out missionaries to the most remote parts of the globe, asking for pennies of the poor in order to maintain the Christian work of deluded devils who no more represent Christ than I do the Pope, and yet unable through its churches and missions at home to rescue the weak and defeated, the miserable and the oppressed. The hospitals, the insane asylums, the prisons filled to overflowing. Counties, some of them big as a European country, practically uninhabited, owned by an intangible corporation whose tentacles reach everywhere and whose responsibilities nobody can formulate or clarify. A man seated in a comfortable chair in New York, Chicago or San Francisco, a man surrounded by every luxury and yet paralyzed with fear and anxiety, controls the lives and destinies of thousands of men and women whom he has never seen, whom he never wishes to see and whose fate he is thoroughly uninterested in.

They were human, and the longer they worked there, the more often they found themselves in situations that forced them to ask the same questions over and over again. Is it worth it, doing incremental good in an imperfect system? Can you be a good person and work somewhere where something like this happens? Paul and many of the employees at Crownsville remind me of a story I grew up hearing from the Caribbean side of my family. One of my aunts in particular loved the Starfish Story. Legend has it that a young Black boy—in Haiti or Cuba or the Dominican Republic, you choose—is walking along a beach that is littered with starfish. Thousands upon thousands of starfish have washed up onto the shore following a terrible storm and they are helpless, dehydrating in the sun. So the little boy begins picking the starfish up one by one and throwing them back into their home in the water. Other people at the beach look at the boy, laugh, and call him naive. One person approaches him and tells him bluntly, “Give up. It makes no difference. You’ll never be able to save all of these starfish.” The boy pauses for a second. He looks up, then leans back down to toss another starfish into the sea. “It makes a difference for that one.” Many of the people of Crownsville decided that it was better to throw as many starfish back into the ocean as they could rather than abandon them all on the shore.

Ignatius, don't you think maybe you'd be happy if you went and took you a little rest at Charity?" "Are you referring to the psychiatric ward by any chance?" Ignatius demanded in a rage. "Do you think that I am insane? Do you suppose that some stupid psychiatrist could even attempt to fathom the workings of my psyche?" "You could just rest, honey. You could write some stuff in your little copybooks." "They would try to make me into a moron who liked television and new cars and frozen food. Don't you understand? Psychiatry is worse than communism. I refuse to be brainwashed. I won't be a robot!" "But, Ignatius, they help out a lot of people got problems." "Do you think that I have a problem?" Ignatius bellowed. "The only problem that those people have anyway is that they don't like new cars and hair sprays. That's why they are put away. They make the other members of the society fearful. Every asylum in this nation is filled with poor souls who simply cannot stand lanolin, cellophane, plastic, television, and subdivisions." "Ignatius, that ain't true. You remember old Mr. Becnel used to live down the block? They locked him up because he was running down the street naked." "Of course he was running down the street naked. His skin could not bear any more of that dacron and nylon clothing that was clogging his pores. I've always considered Mr. Becnel one of the martyrs of our age.

Doctor Andrey Yefimitch, of whom we shall have more to say hereafter, prescribed cold compresses on his head and laurel drops, shook his head, and went away, telling the landlady he should not come again, as one should not interfere with people who are going out of their minds.

That insanity is a form of freedom became the basic assumption of Foucault’s most widely read work, Madness and Civilization (1961). The dichotomy is significant; in the precapitalist West of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Foucault claimed, insanity was understood to be part of the human condition, even an ironic comment on man’s pretensions to autonomy and power. Then the classical age defined madness as the enemy of reason and hence the enemy of humanity, requiring rigid and brutal segregation of the insane and other “deviants” in asylums and hospitals. That process of “confinement,” the categorizing, segregation, and exclusion of what seems foreign and hence threatening to the rationalizing self, defined for Foucault the Enlightenment mind and all of modern civilization. All of modern society is, for Foucault, a prison with modern man its inmate.

Insane asylums are full of lunatics with certainties!

Poveglia is a small island that’s grand with infamy, reported to be the most haunted place in the world and for good reason, too. During the plague it was used as a lazaretto to confine the dying. Rumors have it that there were so many plague-ridden bodies burned on the island that the soil is comprised mostly of human ash. I don’t think that’s a rumor though, I’ve been there once just passing through on a boat, and I didn’t even have to step on the island to smell how deep the stench of death goes. After the plague, it was used as a quarantine station for those entering Venice, then it was turned into an insane asylum, naturally, then a hospital and care home for the elderly to spend their last days, until it was finally closed in the 1960s. Now it’s completely abandoned, though the hospital and watchtower remain.

I want too much. I always have. And all the while I am aware of a larger despair, as if Helen & I are vessels for the despair of all women and many men too. Who are we and where are we going? Why are we, with all our ‘progress,’ so limited in understanding & sympathy & the ability to give each other real freedom? Why with our emphasis on the individual are we still so blinded by the urge to conform? Charlotte wrote that rumors are flying about Howard and Paul, and Howard might lose his job at Yale. And her nephew, getting his PhD at Wisconsin, was declared insane and committed to a state asylum when they discovered he was a leader in the Communist Party there. I think above all else it is freedom I search for in my work, in these far-flung places, to find a group of people who give each other the room to be in whatever way they need to be. And maybe I will never find it all in one culture but maybe I can find parts of it in several cultures, maybe I can piece it together like a mosaic and unveil it to the world. But the world is deaf. The world—and really I mean the West—has no interest in change or self-improvement and my role it seems to me on a dark day like today is merely to document these oddball cultures in the nick of time, just before Western mining and agriculture annihilate them. And then I fear that this awareness of their impending doom alters my observations, laces all of it with a morose nostalgia. This mood is glacial, gathers up all the debris as it rolls through: my marriage, my work, the fate of the world, Helen, the ache for a child, even Bankson, a man I knew for 4 days and may easily never see again. All these pulls on me that cancel one another out like an algebraic equation I can’t solve.

That smell would stick around for days the first few times you encountered it, and you would wake up at night thinking you were still surrounded by the dead bodies. You’d even hear screams and gunshots from time to time, only to find yourself in the safety of your bed. That excruciating feeling would either linger until it devoured you or until you got entirely desensitized to it. Those who didn’t get used to it were either dead or in an insane asylum.

Universities and schools were also dominated by the Jewish spirit. Jewish pornographers and quasi-scientists were widely received as bearers of new and fruitful ideas. The most notorious of them were two sexual specialists Max Hodann and Wilhelm Reich, who was employed as a permanent lecturer at the University of Oslo and had a large congregation in the capital and across the country. These two Jewish pornographers were among Norwegian youth for years, under the protection of the ruling party, carried out destructive activities under Hirschfeld's sexual program - primarily among working-class youth, and were adored by "liberated" decadent intellectuals. Reich, had his own "research institute" in Oslo, where he conducted his sexual experiments. He even went so far as to ask the director of an insane asylum to use the insane for this criminal experiments in the sexual field. The psychoanalysis of the Jew Freud also had a great and harmful influence. "Modern child rearing" was also inspired by the same circles.

So they went at it again, driven only by the aching loneliness of their existence, two boys with intelligent minds trapped in bodies that would not cooperate, caged in cribs like toddlers, living in an insane asylum, the insanity of it seeming to live on itself and charge them,

It is easy to see how, in a world as devoid of meaning as the one that all of these fictional characters inhabit - a world modeled closely on the real modern world - madness is both a legitimate response and an effective challenge to the superficial sanity of the social order and historical process…only the person out of step with society has an appropriate vantage point from which to view its failings; only the person who fails to obey the institutions that mandate certain behaviors can appreciate their rigidity and the consequences of nonconformity. And only those who are victims of the system can bring about real reforms in it. Only the inmates can run the asylum - and, as much of the best experimental fiction of recent years suggests, only the inmates should.

Only 344 days left until I’m out of this cage. Until I’m free. I’ve been stuck in this gloomy establishment for almost a decade. Crimson Manor in Desdemona Hill, North Carolina―a state hospital for the criminally insane.

I have always been a vicious man, and my time in the looney bin hasn’t done much to tame me. I am going to help her kill her husband.

Dear Lucy, You must think I am a madman, and I have no way of denying that. You left your print on me with your words. I see you for what you are. You are both a savage and a sweetheart, and I intend to worship both in you.

My obsession with Mrs. Thompson turns a shade darker each day. She’s my Lucy. My little brute. She is perfect. I must be scaring her. Oh, hell, she must be absolutely terrified by this point. That thought makes me damned jubilant. She needs to be scared. Because I? I am not a good man. Far from it. 337 days left of my sentence. I am counting the days until the fun can really begin…

Crazy is what you need to escape from an insane asylum.

How long do you think it takes for you to start doubting yourself when everyone around you questions your behavior and thoughts? Now imagine you are born inside an asylum, and everyone around you is insane. Then imagine this asylum of souls is the size of a whole planet, and you have a clearer understanding of the meaning of life. I've often been perceived as either mad, courageous, crazy or antisocial for speaking what nobody else can see or understand. But it has nothing to do with those conclusions, based on the same ignorance of the observers. I was simply being sane. Being sane is not a normal thing on a planet full of the insane.