Joyce Lunatics Quotes

B-but, Mr Jimson, I w-want to be an artist.' 'Of course you do,' I said, 'everybody does once. But they get over it, thank God, like the measles and the chickenpox. Go home and go to bed and take some hot lemonade and put on three blankets and sweat it out.' 'But Mr J-Jimson, there must be artists.' 'Yes, and lunatics and lepers, but why go and live in an asylum before you're sent for? If you find life a bit dull at home,' I said, 'and want to amuse yourself, put a stick of dynamite in the kitchen fire, or shoot a policeman. Volunteer for a test pilot, or dive off Tower Bridge with five bob's worth of roman candles in each pocket. You'd get twice the fun at about one-tenth of the risk.

With what meditations did Bloom accompany his demonstration to his companion of various constellations? Meditations of evolution increasingly vaster: of the moon invisible in incipient lunation, approaching perigee: of the infinite lattiginous scintillating uncondensed milky way, discernible by daylight by an observer placed at the lower end of a cylindrical vertical shaft 5000 ft deep sunk from the surface towards the centre of the earth: of Sirius (alpha in Canis Maior) 10 lightyears (57,000,000,000,000 miles) distant and in volume 900 times the dimension of our planet: of Arcturus: of the precession of equinoxes: of Orion with belt and sextuple sun theta and nebula in which 100 of our solar systems could be contained: of moribund and of nascent new stars such as Nova in 1901: of our system plunging towards the constellation of Hercules: of the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving wanderers from immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity.

Morgan tried to laugh, but she sounded like a lunatic. Her voice wrenched up an octave. “Oh no, there isn’t anything wrong. Everything’s fine.” What are you doing? Brent mouthed. She’d been kicked out of high school theater for a reason.

[Ulysses] appears to have been written by a perverted lunatic who has made a speciality of the literature of the latrine… I have no stomach for Ulysses… James Joyce is a writer of talent, but in Ulysses he has ruled out all the elementary decencies of life and dwells appreciatively on things that sniggering louts of schoolboys guffaw about. In addition to this stupid glorification of mere filth, the book suffers from being written in the manner of a demented George Meredith. There are whole chapters of it without any punctuation or other guide to what the writer is really getting at. Two-thirds of it is incoherent, and the passages that are plainly written are devoid of wit, displaying only a coarse salacrity intended for humour.

This is a work of fiction incorporating episodes from the lives of the historic J. Marion Sims, M.D. (1813–1883), “the Father of Modern Gynecology”; Silas Weir Mitchell, M.D. (1829–1914), “the Father of Medical Neurology”; and Henry Cotton, M.D. (1876–1933), the director of the New Jersey Lunatic Asylum from 1907 to 1930. Several passages, scattered through the text, have been adapted from passages in Sims’s The Story of My Life (1888). Particular thanks are due to Andrew Scull’s Madhouse: A Tragic Tale of Megalomania and Modern Medicine (Yale University Press, 2005), a chronicle of the life and career of Henry Cotton; and Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture (1830–1980) (Pantheon Books, 1985).

There were twenty-four rooms of glass cases of stuffed animals in the natural history museum, including a seventeenth-century hippopotamus that had once belonged to the Medici. Born in the seventeenth century, died in the seventeenth century, stuffed in the seventeenth century. The hippo had company. Pangolins, a skunk. A walrus filled to bursting with a long scar down his chest, looking like a heart patient who wouldn’t reform his habits despite everything. Two slack-jawed sharks, one a lunatic bon vivant, the other (only a slight turndown in his expression) aghast at his colleague.

Always it was touching, among the flotsam & jetsam of the Asylum populace, how many of the female lunatics were eager to please their physicians, even while enduring pain; in this, in mimicry of females generally, who are raised to please men, & in that way improve their lot in life.