Madness Friendship Quotes

Was I ever crazy? Maybe. Or maybe life is… Crazy isn’t being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It’s you or me amplified. If you ever told a lie and enjoyed it. If you ever wished you could be a child forever. They were not perfect, but they were my friends.

They'll say you are bad or perhaps you are mad or at least you should stay undercover. Your mind must be bare if you would dare to think you can love more than one lover.

We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter

Love is friendship gone mad.

I guess you can be yourself, whatever that means-the best and worst of you. And they love you anyway. You can fight, but even when you're mad at them, you know they're not going to stop being your friend.

She was chaos and beauty intertwined. A tornado of roses from divine.

Hard-covered books break up friendships. You loan a hard covered book to a friend and when he doesn’t return it you get mad at him. It makes you mean and petty. But twenty-five cent books are different.

Friendship was another illusion like love, though it did not reach the same mad heights. People pretended that they were friends, when the fact was they were brought together by force of circumstances.

Some guys step on a rake in the dark, and get mad and go punch somebody. Others step on a rake in the dark and fall down laughing at themselves. I know which kind of guy I'd rather be. So do my friends.

I am mad, I am going under, I must follow the advice of a friend, and pay no heed to myself.

You are engaging in madness. I feel obliged to accompany you.

It seeems like so long ago but I'm sorry I yelled at you after the party" "I doubt it'll be the last time" he chuckles. "Phillip" "Well, at least I hope it won't be the last time because it would mean you weren't with me I roll my eyes at him. I don't get mad at him often. Just when he disagrees with me. "I'll always love my princess" He smiles."Even when she's mad at me.

Certain people will be upset when you speak the truth. They might get mad. They might get really mad. That's because they are still living the lie you've exposed. Stay strong. Speak truth. Do not allow yourself to get pulled back into their lie just to make others happy and yourself miserable. You are free. Stay free.

London The Institute Year of Our Lord 1878 “Mother, Father, my chwaer fach, It’s my seventeenth birthday today. I know that to write to you is to break the law, I know that I will likely tear this letter into pieces when it is finished. As I have done on all my birthdays past since I was twelve. But I write anyway, to commemorate the occasion - the way some make yearly pilgrimages to a grave, to remember the death of a loved one. For are we not dead to each other? I wonder if when you woke this morning you remembered that today, seventeen years ago, you had a son? I wonder if you think of me and imagine my life here in the Institute in London? I doubt you could imagine it. It is so very different from our house surrounded by mountains, and the great clear blue sky and the endless green. Here, everything is black and gray and brown, and the sunsets are painted in smoke and blood. I wonder if you worry that I am lonely or, as Mother always used to, that I am cold, that I have gone out into the rain again without a hat? No one here worries about those details. There are so many things that could kill us at any moment; catching a chill hardly seems important. I wonder if you knew that I could hear you that day you came for me, when I was twelve. I crawled under the bed to block out the sound of you crying my name, but I heard you. I heard mother call for her fach, her little one. I bit my hands until they bled but I did not come down. And, eventually, Charlotte convinced you to go away. I thought you might come again but you never did. Herondales are stubborn like that. I remember the great sighs of relief you would both give each time the Council came to ask me if I wished to join the Nephilim and leave my family, and each time I said no and I send them away. I wonder if you knew I was tempted by the idea of a life of glory, of fighting, of killing to protect as a man should. It is in our blood - the call to the seraph and the stele, to marks and to monsters. I wonder why you left the Nephilim, Father? I wonder why Mother chose not to Ascend and to become a Shadowhunter? Is it because you found them cruel or cold? I have no fathom side. Charlotte, especially, is kind to me, little knowing how much I do not deserve it. Henry is mad as a brush, but a good man. He would have made Ella laugh. There is little good to be said about Jessamine, but she is harmless. As little as there is good to say about her, there is as much good to say about Jem: He is the brother Father always thought I should have. Blood of my blood - though we are no relation. Though I might have lost everything else, at least I have gained one thing in his friendship. And we have a new addition to our household too. Her name is Tessa. A pretty name, is it not? When the clouds used to roll over the mountains from the ocean? That gray is the color of her eyes. And now I will tell you a terrible truth, since I never intend to send this letter. I came here to the Institute because I had nowhere else to go. I did not expect it to ever be home, but in the time I have been here I have discovered that I am a true Shadowhunter. In some way my blood tells me that this is what I was born to do.If only I had known before and gone with the Clave the first time they asked me, perhaps I could have saved Ella’s life. Perhaps I could have saved my own. Your Son, Will

Life is a bus ride, with only so many seats. It took me a long time to comprehend that sometimes people had to leave my life, to make room for the better ones, but once I understood that it became easier to let go, and I was surprised at just how quickly new, interesting people somehow found their way onto my bus.

She told him the plan. It was loud and dumb and very likely to hurt, so, of course, he agreed.

A man called Ali is in need of money and asks his boss to help him. His Boss sets him a challenge: if he can spend all night at the top of a mountain, he will receive a great reward; if he fails, he will have to work for free. When he left the shop, Ali noticed that an icy wind was blowing. He felt afraid and decided to ask his best friend, Aydi, if he thought he was mad to accept the wager. After considering the matter for a moment Aydi answered, " Don't worry, I'll help you. Tomorrow night, when you're sitting on top of the mountain, look straight ahead. I'll be on top of the mountain opposite, where I'll keep a fire burning all night for you. Look at the fire and think of our friendship, and that will keep you warm. You'll make it through the night, and afterward, I'll ask you for something in return. Ali won the wager, got the money, and went to his friend's house. "you said you wanted some sort of payment in return." Aydi said, "Yes, but it isn't money. Promise that if ever a cold wind blows through my life, you will light the fire of friendship for me

A handsome young knight is madly in love with a princess, and she too is in love with him, though she seems not to be entirely aware of it. Despite the friendship that blossoms between them, or perhaps because of that very friendship, the young knight finds himself so humbled and speechless that he is totally unable to bring up the subject of his love. Until one day he asks the princess point-blank: Is it better to speak or to die?

Marry your best friend. I do not say that lightly. Really, truly find the strongest, happiest friendship in the person you fall in love with. Someone who speaks highly of you. Someone you can laugh with. The kind of laughs that make your belly ache, and your nose snort. The embarrassing, earnest, healing kind of laughs. Wit is important. Life is too short not to love someone who lets you be a fool with them. Make sure they are somebody who lets you cry, too. Despair will come. Find someone that you want to be there with you through those times. Most importantly, marry the one that makes passion, love, and madness combine and course through you. A love that will never dilute - even when the waters get deep, and dark.

All of sudden I cared what someone thought of me. Because we are friends. And making you miserable and angry makes me miserable and angry. I don’t want to be the person to make you mad or cry, Ryiah. I want to make you laugh. I want you to make me laugh, because gods know you are the only one who can. So, yes, I am sorry, I am sorry because even if I was right, I was also wrong. And I’d rather lose a silly battle than your friendship.

Death will not be denied. To try is grandiose. It drives madness into the soul. It leaches out virtue. It injects poison into friendship, and makes a mockery of love.

I long ago abandoned the notion of a life without storms, or a world without dry and killing seasons. Life is too complicated, too constantly changing, to be anything but what it is. And I am, by nature, too mercurial to be anything but deeply wary of the grave unnaturalness involved in any attempt to exert too much control over essentially uncontrollable forces. There will always be propelling, disturbing elements, and they will be there until, as Lowell put it, the watch is taken from the wrist. It is, at the end of the day, the individual moments of restlessness, of bleakness, of strong persuasions and maddened enthusiasms, that inform one’s life, change the nature and direction of one’s work, and give final meaning and color to one’s loves and friendships.

The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course. Until Caroline had died I had belonged to that other world, the place of innocence, and linear expectations, where I thught grief was a simple, wrenching realm of sadness and longing that graduallu receded. What that definition left out was the body blow that loss inflicts, as well as the temporary madness, and a range of less straightforward emotions shocking in their intensity.

There are people who read books, and then there are people who define their lives by the books they have read and by the books they will read. Their relationship with books is not one of gleaning information and then discarding. It is a friendship that is more akin to, if it were possible, putting an arm around the book and whispering to it, giggling and chuckling with shared knowledge, shared experiences. When you see someone grasp a book to their breast and close their eyes or hold the book to their nose and inhale the scent of the book, they are gently mad, but also they are not just a reader of books, but a lover of books.

So they were pen pals now, Emma composing long, intense letters crammed with jokes and underlining, forced banter and barely concealed longing; two-thousand-word acts of love on air-mail paper. Letters, like compilation tapes, were really vehicles for unexpressed emotions and she was clearly putting far too much time and energy into them. In return, Dexter sent her postcards with insufficient postage: ‘Amsterdam is MAD’, ‘Barcelona INSANE’, ‘Dublin ROCKS. Sick as DOG this morning.’ As a travel writer, he was no Bruce Chatwin, but still she would slip the postcards in the pocket of a heavy coat on long soulful walks on Ilkley Moor, searching for some hidden meaning in ‘VENICE COMPLETELY FLOODED!!!!

And the peace! The most magnificent peace. I lose myself in a place where time no longer exists and nothing is impossible. I can do anything I imagine. I can fight and win any war. Nothing frightens me, because I know I'm here for a reason; and I'm not alone. I have friends in high places. Friends here. Friends up there. Victory is mine.

As suddenly as they had reached for each other, they broke apart. Tears were rolling down Robin's face. For one moment of madness, Strike yearned to say, “Come with me”, but there are words that can never be unsaid or forgotten, and those, he knew, were some of them.

Sophia shrieked and fainted on the ground – I screamed and instantly ran mad. We remained thus mutually deprived of our senses, some minutes, and on regaining them were deprived of them again. For an Hour and a Quarter did we continue in this unfortunate situation – Sophia fainting every moment and I running mad as often. At length a groan from the hapless Edward (who alone retained any share of life) restored us to ourselves.

Normal people are not always boring. On the contrary. Volatility and passion, although often more romantic and enticing, are not intrinsically preferable to a steadiness of experience and feeling about another person (nor are they incompatible). These are beliefs, of course, that one has intuitively about friendships and family; they become less obvious when caught up in a romantic life that mirrors, magnifies, and perpetuates one's own mercurial emotional life and temperament. It has been with my pleasure, and not-inconsiderable pain, that I have learned about the possibilities of love - its steadiness and its growth - from my husband, the man with whom I had lived for almost a decade.

B-b-but who will I have cleaning marathons with?” “Casey. I’ll be there in spirit.” “She’s not neurotic and cranky like you.” “You’ll miss that, ay?” “Hell yes, I’ll miss that! When you’re obsessive and pissy, you tell those floors who’s boss. They won’t shine like that when Casey scrubs them. And don’t get me started on our Covenant Series discussions. The girl thinks Alex should pick Seth. Seth, Em. How can I clean with someone who isn’t Team Aiden? It’s like...madness. Madness on Earth. The fucking apocalypse—” “Whitney,” I chuckled, squeezing her tighter, “I assure you, you’ll survive. The second she starts running her mouth about Aiden, just spray her with bleach. That’ll teach her a lesson.” -Emma and Whitney

It’s a mad, mad world when your best friend is a dog and your second-best friend is an automatic rifle, but such was life in the Aze.

Neither one of the two friends felt any great need of talking. As yet. They had time; summer lay before them, long and full of promises.

If a friend starts behaving silly because you bother him so much, don't worry, you're not the first person, he has got a sting in his stomach, an hunger that causes an epidemic hatred.

I felt accepted for who I was. I didn't have to sort the words in my head first, making sure they were socially acceptable before I said them. I groped around for a word that fit. Peace. I felt peaceful.

Love, genuine passionate love, was his for the first time. This he had never experienced at Judge Miller's down in the sun-kissed Santa Clara Valley. With the Judge's sons, hunting and tramping, it had been a working partnership; with the Judge's grandsons, a sort of pompous guardianship; and with the Judge himself, a stately and dignified friendship. But love that was feverish and burning, that was adoration, that was madness, it had taken John Thornton to arouse.

I like to live always at the beginnings of life, not at their end. We all lose some of our faith under the oppression of mad leaders, insane history, pathologic cruelties of daily life. I am by nature always beginning and believing and so I find your company more fruitful than that of, say, Edmund Wilson, who asserts his opinions, beliefs, and knowledge as the ultimate verity. Older people fall into rigid patterns. Curiosity, risk, exploration are forgotten by them. You have not yet discovered that you have a lot to give, and that the more you give the more riches you will find in yourself. It amazed me that you felt that each time you write a story you gave away one of your dreams and you felt the poorer for it. But then you have not thought that this dream is planted in others, others begin to live it too, it is shared, it is the beginning of friendship and love. […] You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing. Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them. If it seems to you that I move in a world of certitudes, you, par contre, must benefit from the great privilege of youth, which is that you move in a world of mysteries. But both must be ruled by faith.

I know I've got no reason to be crying; I know that there is nowhere left to run. I know that there's no reason to be hiding, I'm just mad at everyone; mad at everyone.

Cursed the crown that brought such grief to me

I think I hate the concept of needing space. What it really means is that the person is mad at you, or hates you, or doesn't give a shit about you. They just don't want to admit it.

I long ago abandoned the notion of a life without storms, or a world without dry and killing seasons. Life is too complicated, too constantly changing, to be anything but what it is. And I am, by nature, too mercurial to be anything but deeply wary of the grave unnaturalness involved in any attempt to exert too much control over essentially uncontrollable forces. There will always be propelling, disturbing elements, and they will be there until, as Lowell put it, the watch is taken from the wrist. It is, at the end of the day, the individual moments of restlessness, of bleakness, of strong persuasions and maddened enthusiasms, that inform one's life, change the nature and direction of one's work, and give final meaning and color to one's loves and friendships.

I respect you, Ryiah. I told you last year you were the one good thing about the Academy and I meant it. You aren’t like anyone else here, or any person I’ve ever met. You’ve overcome so much and yet at the end of it you are still kind. You still care.” “I don’t want to be the person to make you mad or cry, Ryiah. I want to make you laugh. I want you to make me laugh, because gods know you are the only one who can. So, yes, I am sorry, I am sorry because even if I was right, I was also wrong. And I’d rather lose a silly battle than your friendship.

I have a suspicion that you are all mad,’ said Dr. Renard, smiling sociably; ‘but God forbid that madness should in any way interrupt friendship.

There are no true animal models for the disease. You can give a rat cancer but you can’t give a rat a thought disorder.

If any man thinks wealth or power of greater worth To him who has them, than a good friend- he is mad.

On the first day of November last year, sacred to many religious calendars but especially the Celtic, I went for a walk among bare oaks and birch. Nothing much was going on. Scarlet sumac had passed and the bees were dead. The pond had slicked overnight into that shiny and deceptive glaze of delusion, first ice. It made me remember sakes and conjure a vision of myself skimming backward on one foot, the other extended; the arms become wings. Minnesota girls know that this is not a difficult maneuver if one's limber and practices even a little after school before the boys claim the rink for hockey. I think I can still do it - one thinks many foolish things when November's bright sun skips over the entrancing first freeze. A flock of sparrows reels through the air looking more like a flying net than seventy conscious birds, a black veil thrown on the wind. When one sparrow dodges, the whole net swerves, dips: one mind. Am I part of anything like that? Maybe not. The last few years of my life have been characterized by stripping away, one by one, loves and communities that sustain the soul. A young colleague, new to my English department, recently asked me who I hang around with at school. "Nobody," I had to say, feeling briefly ashamed. This solitude is one of the surprises of middle age, especially if one's youth has been rich in love and friendship and children. If you do your job right, children leave home; few communities can stand an individual's most pitiful, amateur truth telling. So the soul must stand in her own meager feathers and learn to fly - or simply take hopeful jumps into the wind. In the Christian calendar, November 1 is the Feast of All Saints, a day honoring not only those who are known and recognized as enlightened souls, but more especially the unknowns, saints who walk beside us unrecognized down the millennia. In Buddhism, we honor the bodhisattvas - saints - who refuse enlightenment and return willingly to the wheel of karma to help other beings. Similarly, in Judaism, anonymous holy men pray the world from its well-merited destruction. We never know who is walking beside us, who is our spiritual teacher. That one - who annoys you so - pretends for a day that he's the one, your personal Obi Wan Kenobi. The first of November is a splendid, subversive holiday. Imagine a hectic procession of revelers - the half-mad bag lady; a mumbling, scarred janitor whose ravaged face made the children turn away; the austere, unsmiling mother superior who seemed with great focus and clarity to do harm; a haunted music teacher, survivor of Auschwitz. I bring them before my mind's eye, these old firends of my soul, awakening to dance their day. Crazy saints; but who knows what was home in the heart? This is the feast of those who tried to take the path, so clumsily that no one knew or notice, the feast, indeed, of most of us. It's an ugly woods, I was saying to myself, padding along a trail where other walkers had broken ground before me. And then I found an extraordinary bouquet. Someone had bound an offering of dry seed pods, yew, lyme grass, red berries, and brown fern and laid it on the path: "nothing special," as Buddhists say, meaning "everything." Gathered to formality, each dry stalk proclaimed a slant, an attitude, infinite shades of neutral. All contemplative acts, silences, poems, honor the world this way. Brought together by the eye of love, a milkweed pod, a twig, allow us to see how things have been all along. A feast of being.

Was life too short? Of course- there was never enough time to do all the things you wanted to do. And of course not- if it were any longer, you'd appreciate it even less than you already did. Was it better to live primarily for the good of yourself, or for the good of others? For the good of yourself, of course- it was madness to take responsibility for other people's happiness. And for others, of course- selfishness was just another way to isolate yourself, when everyone knew that true happiness was all about friendship and love.

No man under heaven deserves these sacrifices from us women. Men! They are the enemies of our innocence and our peace—they drag us away from our parents' love and our sisters' friendship—they take us body and soul to themselves, and fasten our helpless lives to theirs as they chain up a dog to his kennel. And what does the best of them give us in return? Let me go, Laura—I'm mad when I think of it!

It was so stupid, and random, but at that second, with the morning sun hitting her auburn hair, and her huge brown eyes fixed on him, the lock flew off the “do-not-allow-yourself-to-even-think-about-it” portion of his brain, and every feeling he ever had for her—feelings he never even realized he had for her—flooded over him like a tidal wave. Love, tenderness, desire—it hit him so hard he had to excuse himself, go to the men’s room, rest his forehead against the cool metal of the bathroom stall, breathing heavily, wondering what the hell had just happened. It left him exhausted and spent, as if he’d just run a hundred miles. And almost a year later, he was still exhausted, spent, frustrated … and madly in love.

The people who are your friends before you got the crown are the people who are going to be your best friends no matter what. Because they are the ones who love you for you-in all your geekiness- and not because of what they can get out of you. Weirdly, in some instances, even the people who were your enemies before you got famous can end up being better friends to you become friends with after you become famous. And even when those friends get mad at you, you still need them, even more than ever. Because they are the people who are willing to tell you the truth.

Don't get mad, William," he finally said, provoking the distraught to look up at him, "I know it's hard, an' unfair, but you can't let yourself become angry. You're too nice, - too good, - if you can't at least hope for a possibility, then what happiness can you expect to have? You have to hold on to it, or else you've got nothing..." (77)

It was hard to imagine him in love. I knew that he and my mother must have once felt passion, since that was what love entailed, but I was grateful that over time the madness had evolved into something more like friendship or a business partnership, something I myself could be an integral part of. Even seeing my father recollect passion was disconcerting.

Internet makes you think that you have millions of friends, whereas you are your own friend.

But I know what it’s like when everyone seems to look at you as if you’re a strange creature impossible to understand, so much so you begin to wonder if they’re right.

I sigh and look at her. 'I must have been mad taking you on as a friend'. ' What are you talking about?' she grins. 'You didn't take me on. I chose you'.

It was strange, because she always felt that she hid herself from Erika, that she was more 'herself' with her 'true' friends, where the friendship flowed in an ordinary, uncomplicated, grown-up fashion (emails, phone calls, drinks, dinners, banter and jokes that everyone got), but right now it felt like none of those friends knew her the raw, ugly, childish, basic way that Erika did.

You don’t unconditionally adore your friends every moment of every day. They can unintentionally hurt your feelings, or make you mad, or upset you by doing something you consider totally inappropriate. You take what they dish out because accepting they’re not perfect is part of a true friendship.

In human closeness there is a secret edge, Nor love nor passion can pass it above, Let lips with lips be joined in silent rage, And hearts be burst asunder with the love. And friendship, too, is powerless plot, And so years of bliss with noble tends, When your heart is free and known not, The slow languor of the earthy sense. And they who strive to reach this edge are mad, But they who reached are shocked with anguish hard - Now you know why beneath your hand You do not feel the beating of my heart.

The rich mistakenly believed their wealth was a servant, delivering them whatever they wanted. They were wrong. Wealth was their master, and it was the only voice they heeded. Friendships were sacrificed at its behest, principles trampled to protect it. No matter how much they had, it was never enough. They went mad chasing more until they sat lonely atop their hoard, despised and afraid. Arent had wanted more.

So we would get together at some ungodly hour, I would be secretly and inexpressibly grateful, and he somehow would have finessed it so that I didn't feel like I was too huge a burden to him. It was a rare gift of friendship.

It is love—friendship—that sustains us, even in the worst of times, under the worst of circumstances. Even when we have been driven mad. Even when we have killed. We still love. We are still worthy of love. We can still be loved.

Beyond question the feeling of a lover has in it something akin to friendship; one might call it friendship run mad. But, though this is true, does anyone love for the sake of gain, or promotion, or renown? Pure love, regardless of all other things, kindles the soul with the desire for the beautiful object, not without the hope of a return of affection.

He slouches,' DeeDee contributes. 'True--he needs to work on his posture,' Thelma says. 'You guys,' I say. 'I'm serious,' Thelma says. 'What if you get married? Don't you want to go to fancy dinners with him and be proud?' 'You guys. We are not getting married!' 'I love his eyes,' Jolene says. 'If your kids get his blue eyes and your dark hair--wouldn't that be fabulous?' 'The thing is,' Thelma says, 'and yes, I know, this is the tricky part--but I'm thinking Bliss has to actually talk to him. Am I right? Before they have their brood of brown-haired, blue-eyed children?' I swat her. "I'm not having Mitchell's children!' 'I'm sorry--what?' Thelma says. Jolene is shaking her head and pressing back laughter. Her expressing says, Shhh, you crazy girl! But I don't care. If they're going to embarrass me, then I'll embarrass them right back. 'I said'--I raise my voice--'I am not having Mitchell Truman's children!' Jolene turns beet red, and she and DeeDee dissolve into mad giggles. 'Um, Bliss?' Thelma says. Her gaze travels upward to someone behind me. The way she sucks on her lip makes me nervous. 'Okaaay, I think maybe I won't turn around,' I announce. A person of the male persuasion clears his throat. 'Definitely not turning around,' I say. My cheeks are burning. It's freaky and alarming how much heat is radiating from one little me. 'If you change your mind, we might be able to work something out,' the person of the male persuasion says. 'About the children?' DeeDee asks. 'Or the turning around?' 'DeeDee!' Jolene says. 'Both,' says the male-persuasion person. I shrink in my chair, but I raise my hand over my head and wave. 'Um, hi,' I say to the person behind me whom I'm still not looking at. 'I'm Bliss.' Warm fingers clasp my own. 'Pleased to meet you,' says the male-persuasion person. 'I'm Mitchell.' 'Hi, Mitchell.' I try to pull my hand from his grasp, but he won't let go. 'Um, bye now!' I tug harder. No luck. Thelma, DeeDee, and Jolene are close to peeing their pants. Fine. I twist around and give Mitchell the quickest of glances. His expressions is amused, and I grow even hotter. He squeezes my hand, then lets go. 'Just keep me in the loop if you do decide to bear my children. I'm happy to help out.' With that, he stride jauntily to the food line. Once he's gone, we lost it. Peals of laughter resound from our table, and the others in the cafeteria look at us funny. We laugh harder. 'Did you see!' Thelma gasps. 'Did you see how proud he was?' 'You improve his posture!' Jolene says. 'I'm so glad, since that was my deepest desire,' I say. 'Oh my God, I'm going to have to quit school and become a nun.' 'I can't believe you waved at him,' DeeDee says. 'Your hand was like a little periscope,' Jolene says. 'Or, no--like a white surrender flag.' 'It was a surrender flag. I was surrendering myself to abject humiliation.' 'Oh, please,' Thelma says, pulling me into a sideways hug. 'Think of it this way: Now you've officially talked to him.

Money had replaced community mental healthcare the way medication had replaced state hospitals. Medication did not go looking for those who resisted taking it, and money could not administer itself. Neither came with counseling or support. The SSI checks Michael received, and the Medicaid requirements he was eligible for, did not create a caring community or even an indifferent one. Nevertheless, checks and pills were what remained of a grand promise, the ingredients of a mental healthcare system that had never been baked but were handed out like flour and yeast in separate packets to starving people.

What is my object in making a friend? To have someone to be able to die for, someone I may follow into exile, someone for whose life I may put myself up as security and pay the price as well. The thing you describe is not friendship but a business deal, looking to the likely consequences, with advantage as its goal. There can be no doubt that the desire lovers have for each other is not so very different from friendship – you might say it was friendship gone mad. Well, then, does anyone ever fall in love with a view to a profit, or advancement, or celebrity? Actual love in itself, heedless of all other considerations, inflames people’s hearts with a passion for the beautiful object, not without the hope, too, that the affection will be mutual. How then can the nobler stimulus of friendship be associated with any ignoble desire?

While learning others, respect demands that one never takes issue with another's freedom to choose their 'get down' - their way of living... and don't be mad. But carefully listen, observe, and compare mental notes before you open your heart's desire -- to make a clear determination what's in your best interest. If you already know how the story ends, and it doesn't fit you, keep [the] proper distance in perspective, in any form(s) of relationship, for the love of self. It may be disappointing, but you'll eventually discover the right one deserving of your full attention. Or, you may be surprised by their sudden awakening to your worthiness. Walk slowly, especially, when it comes to matters of the heart.

Song of myself Now I will do nothing but listen, To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute toward it. I hear bravuras of birds, bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames, clack of sticks cooking my meals, I hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice, I hear all sounds running together, combined, fused or following, Sounds of the city and sounds out of the city, sounds of the day and night, Talkative young ones to those that like them, the loud laugh of work-people at their meals, The angry base of disjointed friendship, the faint tones of the sick, The judge with hands tight to the desk, his pallid lips pronouncing a death-sentence, The heave'e'yo of stevedores unlading ships by the wharves, the refrain of the anchor-lifters, The ring of alarm-bells, the cry of fire, the whirr of swift-streaking engines and hose-carts with premonitory tinkles and color'd lights, The steam-whistle, the solid roll of the train of approaching cars, The slow march play'd at the head of the association marching two and two, (They go to guard some corpse, the flag-tops are draped with black muslin.) I hear the violoncello, ('tis the young man's heart's complaint,) I hear the key'd cornet, it glides quickly in through my ears, It shakes mad-sweet pangs through my belly and breast. I hear the chorus, it is a grand opera, Ah this indeed is music--this suits me.

A queer and almost mad notion seems to have got into the modern head that, if you mix up everybody and everything more or less anyhow, the mixture may be called unity, and the unity may be called peace. It is supposed that, if you break down all doors and walls so that there is no domesticity, there will then be nothing but friendship. Surely somebody must have noticed by this time that the men living in a hotel quarrel at least as often as the men living in a street.

A mental illness diagnosis does not automatically sentence you to a bleak and painful life, devoid of pleasure or joy or accomplishment. I also wanted to dispel the myths held by many mental-health professionals themselves—that people with a significant thought disorder cannot live independently, cannot work at challenging jobs, cannot have true friendships, cannot be in meaningful, sexually satisfying love relationships, cannot lead lives of intellectual, spiritual, or emotional richness.

Beyond question the feeling of a loves has in it something akin to friendship; one might call it friendship run mad. But, though this is true, does anyone love for the sake of gain, or promotion, or renown? Pure love, regardless of all other things, kindles the soul with the desire for the beautiful object, not without the hope of a return of affection.

Beyond question the feeling of a lover has in it something akin to friendship; one might call it friendship run mad. But, though this is true, does anyone love for the sake of gain, or promotion, or renown? Pure[7] love, careless of all other things, kindles the soul with desire for the beautiful object, not without the hope of a return of the affection.

There is nothing you wouldn’t do for him, no limits you wouldn’t cross.

Some friendships go deeper than madness or common sense

Balzac’s assertion, which my mother also quoted, that behind every great fortune was a great crime,

To this day, I find it remarkable that anyone can eat, sleep, or, like, breathe knowing someone else is mad at them.

Den stora världen är farlig, där är det ingen som känner till en och vet vad man tycker om och vad man är rädd för.

Love, as I understand it, is learned through hardship and sacrifice, through dedication and commitment.

Man craves joy far more than anything else in life, but there is nothing as madly intoxicating as the feeling of joy that comes from the soul.

Hypocrisy is when you get mad at a friend for telling their other friend a secret that your other friend told you.

A good friend is someone who is there for me when i'm glad or sad...who I can laugh madly with or cry badly with.

The beauty of postmodernism was that it erased the world with one hand while rewriting it with the other, allowing you to inherit the authority you discredited like a spoil of war.

You resist my words because of your own insecurities and the fear that right now you could be the God that you truly are.

I looked up into Myra's face, twisted with madness. It was the look she gave our enemy in battle, and now it fell on me.

No,” said George. “No, Lennie. I ain’t mad. I never been mad, an’ I ain’t now. That’s a thing I want ya to know.

She was talking too loud now, shouting almost, and a long silence followed. Why was she being like this? He was only trying to help. In what way did he benefit from this friendship? He should get up and walk away, that’s what he should do. They turned to look at each other at the same time. “Sorry,” he said. “No, I’m sorry.” “What are you sorry for?” “Rattling on like a….mad cow. I’m sorry, I’m tired, bad day, and I’m sorry for being…so boring.” “You’re not that boring.” “I am, Dex. God, I swear, I bore myself.” “Well you don’t bore me.” He took her hand in his. “You couldd never bore me. You’re one in a million, Em.” “I’m not even one in three.” He kicked her foot with his. “Em?” “What?” “Just take it, will you? Just shut up and take it.

Perhaps your friendship with your mother is just shifting to something more… adult.” That felt like a huge responsibility. If I forgave my mother for hiding the truth from me, then I had to totally own my part in our relationship. I couldn’t play the little girl anymore. I couldn’t hide behind her authority and rules and then get mad when they didn’t fit. I’d have to make my own choices and take charge of my own well-being. It’s one thing to say ‘I’m old enough to make my own rules’ and it’s a totally different thing to make the right ones. And live by them.

These people know the reality and laugh at it. Such laughter has little concern with what is funny. It is often bitter and sometimes a little mad, for it is the laugh under the mask of tragedy, and also the laughter that masks tears. They are the same. It is the laughter of people who value love and friendship and plenty, who have lived with terror and death and hate." - , Return to Laughter (1954)

Somehow she knew there would be an unspoken truce on their unspoken battle over God knew what when they were old. They could both surrender to their innate grumpiness. It was going to be a lovely relief.

We continued dancing as a swift gale wheeled through the hills of Santa Cruz. Xuan leaned down to whisper into my ear, his lips lightly brushing the helix. “Once upon a time there was a boy, and he loved a girl very much. He was sad because he didn’t think the girl noticed him. Until one day the uni- verse intervened and a beautiful comet brought them together after a tragic accident occurred that day. The boy and the girl found comfort and friendship in each other that night. And something new and extraordinary began to blossom under the heavens, something that would burn with such bright- ness that all the stars would be in awe. And the boy fell madly in love with the girl and promised to always find her, in this life and the next.” “That’s my favorite story.” Xuan smiled. “It’s the best one I’ve ever told, Ms. Steel.

It was easy to say that Michael had lost his mind, but his mind was the only instrument he had for locating what he’d lost. Knowing and not knowing were gray areas to begin with, shot through with ignorance and denial.

I look on my friendship with her as a treasure and a privilege. I shan't ever fall in love with her, padlock, but I am absolutely devoted to her and if she died I should mind quite, quite dreadfully. Or went mad again.

That was kind of a joke. It gave her hope for the night that he was making a joke. Sam had been the first man she ever dated who immediately and instinctively grasped the complexities of her friendship with Erika. He’d never reacted with impatience or incomprehension; he’d never said, ‘I don’t get it, if you don’t like her, don’t hang out with her!’ He’d just accepted Erika as part of the Clementine package, as if she were a difficult sister.

Images barraged him. Connections darted electric. Veins. Roots. Forked lightning. Tributaries. Branches. Vines snaked around trees, herds of animals, drops of water running together. I don’t understand. Fingers twined together. Shoulder leaned on shoulder. Fist bumping fist. Hand dragging Adam up from the dirt. Cabeswater rifled madly through Adam’s own memories and flashed them through his mind. It hurled images of Gansey, Ronan, Noah, and Blue so fast that Adam couldn’t keep up with all of them. Then the grid of lightning blasted across the world, an illuminated grid of energy. Adam still did not understand, and then he did. There was more than one Cabeswater. Or more of whatever it was.

These were the rains that drove people close to the walls, under the balconies, or sent them dashing madly through the squares, and drenched the fluttering ribbons and bright trappings of the horses so that their flanks were streaked with delicate watercolors. The storms washed the streets so that little streams of brown water went roaring along the gutters toward the sea, and thundered on the roofs of the cafés where people were crowded together laughing in the steam and half darkness. I loved those rains; they were of the sort that is welcomed by everyone, preceded by hot, oppressive hours of stillness; they came the way storms come in the islands but did not last as long, and often the sun came out when they had passed. I was happy whenever the rain caught me walking about in the streets, for then I would rush into the nearest café, along with all the others who were escaping from the weather, all of us crushing laughing through the doors. The rain allowed me to go anywhere, to form quick, casual friendships, forced to share one of the overcrowded tables, among the beaming waiters who pushed good-naturedly through the throngs carrying cups of steaming apple cider.

Gregory?” I called. I couldn’t help myself. It was irrational, but I was scared to see him run from me. He turned my direction, his feet pivoting in the dirt. Warily, I crossed into the light for a moment. “Do you, um…” I inhaled deeply. “Do you think you’ll still want to be my friend tomorrow?” I held my breath and waited for his answer. Although I could feel the sunshine perceptibly tingle every inch of exposed skin, the way Gregory smiled at me produced a swell of warmth unmatchable even for the sun. “I’ll always want to be your friend, Annabelle. Do you want to be mine?” My head nodded like mad, ecstatic, all on its own. I disappeared among the shadows again and watched my new friend until he stepped around the Hopkins’ house. Then I waited until his car drove off -- Gregory and his mother headed for home. I was on a high like no other, but I’d not lost my grasp on reality entirely. I knew that the real test would come Monday. It was one thing to befriend an outcast in the privacy of the woods, but quite another to risk ridicule and reputation when surrounded by peers. This was true even for those with the biggest of hearts, which I now believed Gregory Hill to have.

But the Esquire passage I found most poignant and revealing was this one: Mister Rogers' visit to a teenage boy severely afflicted with cerebral palsy and terrible anger. One of the boys' few consolations in life, Junod wrote, was watching Mister Rogers Neighborhood. 'At first, the boy was made very nervous by the thought that Mister Rogers was visiting him. He was so nervous, in fact, that when Mister Rogers did visit, he got mad at himself and began hating himself and hitting himself, and his mother had to take him to another room and talk to him. Mister Rogers didn't leave, though. He wanted something from the boy, and Mister Rogers never leaves when he wants something from somebody. He just waited patiently, and when the boy came back, Mister Rogers talked to him, and then he made his request. He said, 'I would like you to do something for me. Would you do something for me?' On his computer, the boy answered yes, of course, he would do anything for Mister Rogers, so then Mister Rogers said: I would like you to pray for me. Will you pray for me?' And now the boy didn't know how to respond. He was thunderstruck... because nobody had ever asked him for something like that, ever. The boy had always been prayed for. The boy had always been the object of prayer, and now he was being asked to pray for Mister Rogers, and although at first he didn't know how to do it, he said he would, he said he'd try, and ever since then he keeps Mister Rogers in his prayers and doesn't talk about wanting to die anymore, because he figures if Mister Rogers likes him, that must mean that God likes him, too. As for Mister Rogers himself... he doesn't look at the story the same way the boy did or I did. In fact, when Mister Rogers first told me the story, I complimented him on being smart - for knowing that asking the boy for his prayers would make the boy feel better about himself - and Mister Rogers responded by looking at me first with puzzlement and then with surprise. 'Oh heavens no, Tom! I didn't ask him for his prayers for him; I asked for me. I asked him because I think that anyone who has gone through challenges like that must be very close to God. I asked him because I wanted his intercession.

Now, whenever one is mad at the other, all we have to say is Bourne, and we have to stop what we are doing and go watch the movie. I sighed. “Really?” He shrugged. “It’s a rule.” I shook my head. “No, it’s not.” “Are you challenging our friendship code?

…from this lamentable history one can learn how great was the cruelty of Marcela, the love of Grisóstomo, and the steadfastness of your friendship, as well as the final destination of those who madly gallop along the path that heedless love places in front of them.

It was loneliness and insecurity that had brought Claudia to the chaos of madness. It was community, love, and friendship that finally brought her inner peace. This movement from chaos to inner peace, from self—hate to self—trust, began when Claudia realized that she was loved.

Sometimes the sensation of being a personal launderette service—friendship must not become a space for indulgence. Listening to casting problems, rehearsal problems, photograph problems. There is a point at which they walk away stronger and you are exhausted. This cannot be right …

The closer the relationship, the greater the opportunities for intimacy. However the greater the opportunity the closer to offence. (A bit deep). Nobody can really make you mad more than someone that you really love. Nobody can hurt you like the somebody you have given your heart to.

loneliness. By all the saints, he was mad. He should be filled with hatred and thoughts of revenge. Vaden was his enemy and that time of friendship has gone. When would he learn to give up those memories and realize Vaden meant what he said? Tonight. From no on he would regard Vaden as any other enemy. To do anything else would endanger Dundragon and Thea. He must close away this sense of loss and behave with sanity. The entire world was a barren place. To accept that Vaden was his enemy did not make the loneliness more desolate. It only seemed to make it weigh heavier, much heavier,

The sheer madness of it rushed at him: to have hazarded his freedom for the sake of those short periods of abandon; for the slick repetitive motions of his cock. Irrumatio, fellatio, paedicatio. For these he had eschewed study, art, friendship; he had sacrificed all the comforts of a home, the dignity of a marriage.

A bagel shop isn't the most romantic spot to tell a girl you like her. But that night romance wasn't the priority. Our time there wasn't intended to be mushy. I didn't propose marriage or say I was madly in love with her, and she didn't swoon. What I did tell her was that through our friendship I'd grown to respect her.

Terence, this is stupid stuff: You eat your victuals fast enough; There can’t be much amiss, ’tis clear, To see the rate you drink your beer. But oh, good Lord, the verse you make, It gives a chap the belly-ache. The cow, the old cow, she is dead; It sleeps well, the horned head: We poor lads, ’tis our turn now To hear such tunes as killed the cow. Pretty friendship ’tis to rhyme Your friends to death before their time Moping melancholy mad: Come, pipe a tune to dance to, lad.’ Why, if ’tis dancing you would be, There’s brisker pipes than poetry. Say, for what were hop-yards meant, Or why was Burton built on Trent? Oh many a peer of England brews Livelier liquor than the Muse, And malt does more than Milton can To justify God’s ways to man. Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink For fellows whom it hurts to think: Look into the pewter pot To see the world as the world’s not. And faith, ’tis pleasant till ’tis past: The mischief is that ’twill not last. Oh I have been to Ludlow fair And left my necktie God knows where, And carried half way home, or near, Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer: Then the world seemed none so bad, And I myself a sterling lad; And down in lovely muck I’ve lain, Happy till I woke again. Then I saw the morning sky: Heigho, the tale was all a lie; The world, it was the old world yet, I was I, my things were wet, And nothing now remained to do But begin the game anew. Therefore, since the world has still Much good, but much less good than ill, And while the sun and moon endure Luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure, I’d face it as a wise man would, And train for ill and not for good. ’Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale Is not so brisk a brew as ale: Out of a stem that scored the hand I wrung it in a weary land. But take it: if the smack is sour, The better for the embittered hour; It should do good to heart and head When your soul is in my soul’s stead; And I will friend you, if I may, In the dark and cloudy day. There was a king reigned in the East: There, when kings will sit to feast, They get their fill before they think With poisoned meat and poisoned drink. He gathered all that springs to birth From the many-venomed earth; First a little, thence to more, He sampled all her killing store; And easy, smiling, seasoned sound, Sate the king when healths went round. They put arsenic in his meat And stared aghast to watch him eat; They poured strychnine in his cup And shook to see him drink it up: They shook, they stared as white’s their shirt: Them it was their poison hurt. —I tell the tale that I heard told. Mithridates, he died old.

Osho was very generous with his genius. When I went to Poona in 1988, he answered a question of mine. “Rumi says, ‘I want burning, burning.’ What does this burning have to do with my own possible enlightenment?” “You have asked a very dangerous question, Coleman. Burning has nothing to do with your enlightenment. This work you have done with Rumi is beautiful. It has to be, because it is coming out of Rumi’s love. But for you these poems can become ecstatic self-hypnosis.” He pretty much nailed me to the floor with that one. Sufism is good, but end up with Zen. It was a fine hit he gave me. I am still drawn to the Sufi longing and love-madness, but clarity is coming up strong on the inside. I have not assimilated his wisdom yet, but I mean to. I am very grateful to him. But it is not wisdom for everyone. Osho crafted his words to suit the individual. Ecstatic self-hypnosis might be just the thing for someone else. He was showing me a daylight beyond any beloved darkness, an ecstatic sobriety beyond any drunkenness.

The immortal sadness of youth possessed her, and the sorrow of which youth is not always conscious, the lucid knowledge of her unsatisfied desires. There was nothing, she thought, that could be trusted; the dearest delight might betray, the gayest friendship open upon a treachery and a martyrdom. Of her friends, of her young male friends especially, pleasant as they were, there was not one, she thought, who held that friendship important for her sake rather than for his own enjoyment. Even that again was but her own selfishness; what right had she to the devotion of any other? And was there any devotion beyond the sudden overwhelming madness of sex? And in that hot airless tunnel of emotion what pleasure was there and what joy? Laughter died there, and lucidity, and the clear intelligence she loved, and there was nothing of the peace for which she hungered. . . . Most of all she hated herself. The dark mystery of being that possessed her held no promise of light, but she turned to it and sank into it content so as to avoid the world.

...if love...is a function of man's sadness, friendship is a function of his cowardice; and if neither can be realised because of the impenetrability (isolation) of all that is not 'cosa mentale,' at least the failure to possess may have the nobility of that which is tragic, whereas the attempt to communicate where no communication is possible is merely a simian vulgarity, or horribly comic, like the madness that holds a conversation with the furniture. - For an artist therefore, the only possible spiritual development is in the sense of depth. The artistic tendency is not expansive, but a contraction. And art is the apotheosis of solitude. There is no communication because there are no vehicles of communication.

So much of our unhappiness comes from comparing our lives, our friendships, our loves, our commitments, our duties, our bodies and our sexuality to some idealized and non-Christian vision of things which falsely assures us that there is a heaven on earth. When that happens, and it does, our tensions begin to drive us mad, in this case to a cancerous restlessness.

The rich mistakenly believed their wealth was a servant, delivering them whatever they wanted. They were wrong. Wealth was their master, and it was the only voice they heeded. Friendships were sacrificed at its behest, principles trampled to protect it. No matter how much they had, it was never enough. They went mad chasing more until they sat lonely atop their hoard, despised and afraid.

But the truth was, I didn’t feel accepted. I didn’t feel acknowledged for my service in raising the next generation, for my active role in the community, or even for being human sometimes. I felt utterly ignored. I felt invisible or, worse, frowned upon. Most of the time, when I looked in the mirror, I saw only my flaws. I saw all the things that advertisements and social media said was wrong with me. I wanted to focus on what was right about this version of myself, like the way I’d learned to take life a little slower and enjoy each moment. Like my appreciation for people’s differences, and for beauty found in unlikely places. For my friendships, new and old. I wanted it to be okay that I wasn’t worried about beauty anymore, or worried about looking young. I just wanted to look like me, however me looked in any given year.

I wanted to focus on what was right about this version of myself, like the way I’d learned to take life a little slower and enjoy each moment. Like my appreciation for people’s differences, and for beauty found in unlikely places. For my friendships, new and old. I wanted it to be okay that I wasn’t worried about beauty anymore, or worried about looking young. I just wanted to look like me, however me looked in any given year.

I felt that I was being ridiculous, and mortally injuring a kind man for ever in my madness—but what was friendship to me, what was my whole life compared with my impatience to feel the touch of your lips again, to hear you speak softly close to me? That is how I loved you. I loved you so much, and now that it is all over and done with I can tell you so. And I believe that if you summoned me from my deathbed I would suddenly find the strength in myself to get up and go with you.

We don't have to doubt that there are indeed people whose faces and surface manner imply all manner of enchanting qualities. But we begin to take our first steps towards emotional maturity when we finally accept (with deep sorrow) that, appearances notwithstanding, everyone is - ultimately - profoundly peculiar and, to put it in a colloquial way, mad: distrubed by their childhoods, unable to understand themselves, inclined to error and perversity and in complicated ways serious trouble to be around.

While reading in my father’s library one evening, I came upon the story of a handsome young knight who is madly in love with a princess. She too is in love with him, though she seems not to be entirely aware of it, and despite the friendship that blossoms between them, or perhaps because of that very friendship, he finds himself so humbled and speechless owing to her forbidding candor that he is totally unable to bring up the subject of his love. One day he asks her point-blank: “Is it better to speak or die?

I came upon the story of a handsome young knight who is madly in love with a princess. She too is in love with him, though she seems not to be entirely aware of it, and despite the friendship that blossoms between them, or perhaps because of that very friendship, he finds himself so humbled and speechless owing to her forbidding candor that he is totally unable to bring up the subject of his love. One day he asks her point-blank: "Is it better to speak or to die?" I'd never even have the courage to ask such a question.

Toxic' was actually an accurate description of the feelings Clementine had so often felt in Erika's presence: the intense aggravation she had to work so hard to resist and conceal, the disappointment with herself, because Erika wasn't evil or cruel or stupid, she was simply annoying, and Clementine's response to her annoyingness was so completely disporportionate, it embarassed and confounded her. Erika loved Clementine. She'd do anything for her. So why did she inflame Clementine so? It was like she was allergic to her.

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.

To come back to the question, the wise man, self-sufficient as he is, still desires to have a friend if only for the purpose of practising friendship and ensuring that those talents are not idle. Not, as Epicurus put it in the same letter, ‘for the purpose of having someone to come and sit beside his bed when he is ill or come to his rescue when he is hard up or thrown into chains’, but so that on the contrary he may have someone by whose sickbed he himself may sit or whom he may himself release when that person is held prisoner by hostile hands. Anyone thinking of his own interests and seeking out friendship with this in view is making a great mistake. Things will end as they began; he has secured a friend who is going to come to his aid if captivity threatens: at the first clank of a chain that friend will disappear. These are what are commonly called fair-weather friendships. A person adopted as a friend for the sake of his usefulness will be cultivated only for so long as he is useful. This explains the crowd of friends that clusters about successful men and the lonely atmosphere about the ruined – their friends running away when it comes to the testing point; it explains the countless scandalous instances of people deserting or betraying others out of fear for themselves. The ending inevitably matches the beginning: a person who starts being friends with you because it pays him will similarly cease to be friends because it pays him to do so. If there is anything in a particular friendship that attracts a man other than the friendship itself, the attraction of some reward or other will counterbalance that of the friendship. What is my object in making a friend? To have someone to be able to die for, someone I may follow into exile, someone for whose life I may put myself up as security and pay the price as well. The thing you describe is not friendship but a business deal, looking to the likely consequences, with advantage as its goal. There can be no doubt that the desire lovers have for each other is not so very different from friendship – you might say it was friendship gone mad. Well, then, does anyone ever fall in love with a view to a profit, or advancement, or celebrity? Actual love in itself, heedless of all other considerations, inflames people’s hearts with a passion for the beautiful object, not without the hope, too, that the affection will be mutual. How then can the nobler stimulus of friendship be associated with any ignoble desire?

Heavenly Blue worried all the time. He worried about the bills and the roof that needed repairing and the strange men who always watched the house and what the neighbors might do next and about Hollyhock's unhappiness. He worried most of all that he would go mad. His worrying got the bills paid and the roof fixed and drove the men away and calmed the neighbors down and helped Hollyhock be happier. And finally his worrying drove him mad. It was the madness of looking inward and being afraid. There had never been enough love and warmth around him and he thought he had gradually dried up inside. He wanted out but he did not know where out was. Lilac and Pinetree and Moonbeam and Loose Tomato and Hollyhock gathered. They held Heavenly Blue in their arms for days, they let him cry and stare and slobber and scream and be silent. They paid the bills and looked after the roof and watched the street for strange men and talked to the neighbors and Hollyhock kept himself happy. Their house filled up with comfort and routine and gladness until Heavenly Blue could no longer resist and became response-able again.

He kisses me even though I try to raise my hand to stop him. And then I don’t stop him. His lips mold against mine like they’re perfectly shaped for each other. He tastes like mint and smells like himself. I want him to hold me forever. I want him to make everything better. And then I realize this is all wrong. Because the truth is, I’m not really mad at Jamie. I mean, I’m mad that he lied, but I’m not really mad at him. I’m mad because I need him. I need him to be perfect and strong and to protect me from everything in the world that’s terrifying. I need him to hold my hand as I walk through life because it’s so much easier than doing it alone. And needing him is a mistake. I don’t want to need anyone. I want to stand on my own two feet. I want control of my own life and my own emotions. I don’t want to be a branch in someone else’s life anymore—I want to be the tree on my own. I want all the strength to come from me. I don’t want to depend on anyone for anything ever again. I pull my face away from Jamie and it literally hurts so much I have to grip the desk to keep from falling over. I can’t hide from the truth anymore. I let Jamie become my crutch. I let him fill all the voids in my life—family, friendship, love—and it hurts so much to know what I need to do now. Panic is in his eyes. He senses what I’m going to say next. Because even when we’re hurt, we still know each other. We know each other without words.

Love, genuine passionate love, was his for the first time. This he had never experienced at Judge Miller’s down in the sun-kissed Santa Clara Valley. With the Judge’s sons, hunting and tramping, it had been a working partnership; with the Judge’s grandsons, a sort of pompous guardianship; and with the Judge himself, a stately and dignified friendship. But love that was feverish and burning, that was adoration, that was madness, it had taken John Thornton to arouse. This man had saved his life, which was something; but, further, he was the ideal master. Other men saw to the welfare of their dogs from a sense of duty and business expediency; he saw to the welfare of his as if they were his own children, because he could not help it. And he saw further. He never forgot a kindly greeting or a cheering word, and to sit down for a long talk with them (“gas” he called it) was as much his delight as theirs. He had a way of taking Buck’s head roughly between his hands, and resting his own head upon Buck’s, of shaking him back and forth, the while calling him ill names that to Buck were love names. Buck knew no greater joy than that rough embrace and the sound of murmured oaths, and at each jerk back and forth it seemed that his heart would be shaken out of his body so great was its ecstasy. And when, released, he sprang to his feet, his mouth laughing, his eyes eloquent, his throat vibrant with unuttered sound, and in that fashion remained without movement, John Thornton would reverently exclaim, “God! you can all but speak!

Mum was always so generous to Lara and me growing up, and it helped me develop a very healthy attitude to money. You could never accuse my mum of being tight: she was free, fun, mad, and endlessly giving everything away--always. Sometimes that last part became a bit annoying (such as if it was some belonging of ours that Mum had decided someone else would benefit more from), but more often than not we were on the receiving end of her generosity, and that was a great spirit to grow up around. Mum’s generosity ensured that as adults we never became too attached to, or attracted by money. I learned from her that before you can get, you have to give, and that money is like a river--if you try to block it up and dam it (that is, cling to it), then, like a damned river, the water will go stagnant and stale, and your life will fester. If you keep the stream moving and keep giving stuff and money away, wherever you can, then the river and the rewards will keep flowing in. I love the quote she once gave me: “When supply seems to have dried up, look around you quickly for something to give away.” It is a law of the universe: to get good things you must first give away good things. (And of course this applies to love and friendship, as well.) Mum was also very tolerant of my unusual aspirations. When I found a ninjutsu school through a magazine, I was determined to go and seek it out and train there. The problem was that it was at the far end of the island in some pretty rough council estate hall. This was before the moped, so poor Mum drove me every week…and would wait for me. I probably never even really thanked her. So, thank you, Mum…for all those times and so much more. By the way, the ninjutsu has come in real handy at times.

[...] Kevin had grown up playing left-handed. Seeing him take on Andrew right-handed was ballsy enough, seeing him actually score was surreal. Kevin kicked them off the court [...], but instead of following [...] he stayed behind with Andrew to keep practicing. Neil watched them over his shoulder. "I saw him first," Nicky said. "I thought you had Erik," Neil said. "I do, but Kevin's on the List," Nicky said. When Neil frowned, Nicky explained. "It's a list of celebrities we're allowed to have affairs with. Kevin is number three." Neil pretended to understand and changed the topic. "How does anyone lose against the Foxes with Andrew in your goal?" "He's good, right? [...] Coach bribed Andrew into saving our collective asses with some really nice booze." "Bribed?" Neil echoed. "Andrew's good," Nicky said again, "but it doesn't really matter to him if we win or lose. You want him to care, you gotta give him incentive." "He can't play like that and not care." "Now you sound like Kevin. You'll find out the hard way, same as Kevin did. Kevin gave Andrew a lot of grief this spring [...]. Up until then they were fighting like cats and dogs. Now look at them. They're practically trading friendship bracelets and I couldn't fit a crowbar between them if it'd save my life." "But why?" Neil asked. "Andrew hates Kevin's obsession with Exy." "The day they start making sense to you, let me know," Nicky said [...]. "I gave up trying to sort it all out weeks ago. [...] But as long as I'm doling out advice? Stop staring at Kevin so much. You're making me fear for your life over here." "What do you mean?" "Andrew is scary territorial of him. He punched me the first time I said I'd like to get Kevin too wasted to be straight." Nicky pointed at his face, presumably where Andrew had decked him. "So yeah, I'm going to crush on safer targets until Andrew gets bored of him. That means you, since Matt's taken and I don't hate myself enough to try Seth. Congrats." "Can you take the creepy down a level?" Aaron asked. "What?" Nikcy asked. "He said he doesn't swing, so obviously he needs a push." "I don't need a push," Neil said. "I'm fine on my own." "Seriously, how are you not bored of your hand by now?" "I'm done with this conversation," Neil said. "This and every future variation of it [...]." The stadium door slammed open as Andrew showed up at last. [...] "Kevin wants to know what's taking you so long. Did you get lost?" "Nicky's scheming to rape Neil," Aaron said. "There are a couple flaws in his plan he needs to work out first, but he'll get there sooner or later." [...] "Wow, Nicky," Andrew said. "You start early." "Can you really blame me?" Nicky glanced back at Neil as he said it. He only took his eyes off Andrew for a second, but that was long enough for Andrew to lunge at him. Andrew caught Nicky's jersey in one hand and threw him hard up against the wall. [...] "Hey, Nicky," Andrew said in stage-whisper German. "Don't touch him, you understand?" "You know I'd never hurt him. If he says yes-" "I said no." "Jesus, you're greedy," Nicky said. "You already have Kevin. Why does it-" He went silent, but it took Neil a moment to realize why. Andrew had a short knife pressed to Nicky's Jersey. [...] Neil was no stranger to violence. He'd heard every threat in the book, but never from a man who smiled as bright as Andrew did. Apathy, anger, madness, boredom: these motivators Neil knew and understood. But Andrew was grinning like he didn't have a knife point where it'd sleep perfectly between Nicky's ribs, and it wasn't because he was joking. Neil knew Andrew meant it. [...] "Hey, are we playing or what?" Neil asked. "Kevin's waiting." [...] Andrew let go of Nicky and spun away. [...] Nicky looked shaken as he stared after the twins, but when he realized Neil was watching him he rallied with a smile Neil didn't believe at all. "On second thought, you're not my type after all [...].

There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you’re high it’s tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one’s marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends’faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against—you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality. It goes on and on, and finally there are only others’ recollections of your behavior—your bizarre, frenetic, aimless behaviors—for mania has at least some grace in partially obliterating memories. What then, after the medications, psychiatrist, despair, depression, and overdose? All those incredible feelings to sort through. Who is being too polite to say what? Who knows what? What did I do? Why? And most hauntingly, when will it happen again? Then, too, are the bitter reminders—medicine to take, resent, forget, take, resent, and forget, but always to take. Credit cards revoked, bounced checks to cover, explanations due at work, apologies to make, intermittent memories (what did I do?), friendships gone or drained, a ruined marriage. And always, when will it happen again? Which of my feelings are real? Which of the me’s is me? The wild, impulsive, chaotic, energetic, and crazy one? Or the shy, withdrawn, desperate, suicidal, doomed, and tired one? Probably a bit of both, hopefully much that is neither. Virginia Woolf, in her dives and climbs, said it all: “How far do our feelings take their colour from the dive underground? I mean, what is the reality of any feeling?

And two, because there was another thing I was mad at Martha for, it had been simmering for the last few days of perhaps for the last few months, and in the same moment, there in the library, I understood exactly what this murky resentment toward her was, and I understood that I would never be able to express it. I resented her for having said, back in October, that she didn't think Cross would be my boyfriend. She had made it true! If she'd said she could picture it, it didn't mean it would have happened. But by saying she couldn't, she'd pretty much sealed that it wouldn't. Had she not understood how literally I took her, how much I trusted her advice? She had discouraged me from being hopeful, and how can you ever forgive a person for that? And how could I ever tell her any of this? It would be too ugly. For me to have messed up, to have done a thing that required her forgiveness, was not atypical. For her to be the one at fault would unbalance our friendship. I would not try to explain anything, and who knew if I could have explained it anyway? The mistake I had made was so public and obvious, and the one she'd made was private and subjective; I was its only witness. NO, I would not tell her anything; I would be good old incompetent Lee, lovably flawed Lee, a golden retriever who just can't stay out of the creek and keeps returning to the house with wet, smelly fur. "So you think I betrayed the wchool?" I said, and I could tell I sounded cranky, but cranky was ( Martha would never know this) something we could recover from--cranky was a car cry from what I actually felt.

And two, because there was another thing I was mad at Martha for, it had been simmering for the last few days or perhaps for the last few months, and in the same moment, there in the library, I understood exactly what this murky resentment toward her was, and I understood that I would never be able to express it. I resented her for having said, back in October, that she didn't think Cross would be my boyfriend. She had made it true! If she'd said she could picture it, it didn't mean it would have happened. But by saying she couldn't, she'd pretty much sealed that it wouldn't. Had she not understood how literally I took her, how much I trusted her advice? She had discouraged me from being hopeful, and how can you ever forgive a person for that? And how could I ever tell her any of this? It would be too ugly. For me to have messed up, to have done a thing that required her forgiveness, was not atypical. For her to be the one at fault would unbalance our friendship. I would not try to explain anything, and who knew if I could have explained it anyway? The mistake I had made was so public and obvious, and the one she'd made was private and subjective; I was its only witness. No, I would not tell her anything; I would be good old incompetent Lee, lovably flawed Lee, a golden retriever who just can't stay out of the creek and keeps returning to the house with wet, smelly fur. "So you think I betrayed the school?" I said, and I could tell I sounded cranky, but cranky was (Martha would never know this) something we could recover from--cranky was a far cry from what I actually felt.

I was aware of being afraid of Michael even as I felt love for him. Hugging him goodbye was like putting my head in the mouth of an old and toothless lion, softened by age but still capable of crushing me.

I have been madly, passionately, deeply in love with you from the very beginning of our friendship. My heart lives and beats only for you. There is no one else when I want you more than my next breath. Ferris, I love you more than life itself. I always have, and I always will. I’m yours, whether you want me or not.

As Eddie saw it, there are very few things that really matter in life, and if you have a few, it’s a lot.

Trust is a poor foundation for an alliance. Almost as poor as friendship.

I understood that theory was a tool of my new profession, but at Berkeley the handle was bigger than the pot. It was also more exciting.

They’re called “phylacteries” in English, a Greek word Michael and I turned into “prophylacteries”—spiritual condoms—which we found hilarious.

gamine

The kind of intuitive understanding that most of us have for friendship, for family relations, for collegial getting along, Archie had for motors, for power tools, for electricity, plumbing, and construction,for how all things were put together and how they could betaken apart.” He could fix or build anything without any instruction and seemingly without trial and error—an ability that seemed magical to my sister and me. But relationships had him stumped when they moved beyond bantering.

There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you’re high it’s tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one’s marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends’ faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against—you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality. It goes on and on, and finally there are only others’ recollections of your behavior—your bizarre, frenetic, aimless behaviors—for mania has at least some grace in partially obliterating memories. What then, after the medications, psychiatrist, despair, depression, and overdose? All those incredible feelings to sort through. Who is being too polite to say what? Who knows what? What did I do? Why? And most hauntingly, when will it happen again? Then, too, are the bitter reminders—medicine to take, resent, forget, take, resent, and forget, but always to take. Credit cards revoked, bounced checks to cover, explanations due at work, apologies to make, intermittent memories (what did I do?), friendships gone or drained, a ruined marriage. And always, when will it happen again? Which of my feelings are real? Which of the me’s is me? The wild, impulsive, chaotic, energetic, and crazy one? Or the shy, withdrawn, desperate, suicidal, doomed, and tired one? Probably a bit of both, hopefully much that is neither. Virginia Woolf, in her dives and climbs, said it all: “How far do our feelings take their colour from the dive underground? I mean, what is the reality of any feeling?

shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones.

The only people for me are the mad ones.

Lose your mind to come to your senses.

Thinking caused anxiety the way walking upright caused backaches. Our ability to remember the past, imagine the future, and use language, all recent acquisitions, did not mesh well with ancient regions of the brain that had guarded us for eons, knew only the present, and did not distinguish between imaginary fears and real trouble.

Loneliness is not the absence of people but the absence of like-minded people.

All six children disappointed their father [Edward White Benson]. Martin, the eldest, was a paragon: brilliant at school, quiet, pious - his father's dream, He stuttered, which may reflect the strain of such perfection under such parents. His death at age seventeen tore a hole in his father that never healed. Nellie tried to be the perfect daughter - working with the poor, caring for her parents, gentle, but always willing to go for a hard gallop with her father for morning exercise. Her death at a young age, unmarried, was for the whole family an afterthought to the awfulness of Martin's loss. Arthur, Fred, and Hugh all found the Anglican religion of their father impossible. Arthur went to church, appreciated the music, the ceremony and its role in social order, but struggled with belief, even when he called out to God in the despair of his blackest depression. Fred was flippant and disengaged, and his first novel, Dodo, the hit of the season in 1893, outraged his father's sense of seriousness. Fred represented Britain at figure skating - a hobby that was as far as he could get from his father's ideals of social and religious commitment, the epitome of a 'waste of time.' Hugh's turn to the Roman Catholic Church was after his father's death - but like all the children, the fight with paternal authority never ceased. While his father was alive, Hugh muffed exams, wanted to go into the Indian Civil Service against his father's wished - he failed those exams too 0 and argued with everyone in the family petulantly. Maggie, too, was 'difficult': 'her friendships were seldom leisurely or refreshing things,' commented Arthur; Nellie more acerbic, added, 'If Maggie would only have an intimate relationship even with a cat, it would be a relief.' Her Oxford tutors found her 'remorseless.' At age twenty-five, still single, she did not know the facts of life. Over the years, her jealousy of her mother's companion Lucy Tait became more and more pronounced, as did her adoption of her father's expressions of strict disapproval. Her depressions turned to madness and violence, leading to her eventual hospitalization. There is another dramatic narrative, then, of the six children, all differently and profoundly scarred by their home life, which they wrote about and thought about repeatedly. Cross-currents of competition between the children, marked by a desperate need for intimacy, in tension with a restraint born of fear of violent emotion and profound distrust (at best) of sexual feeling, produced a fervid and damaging family dynamic. There is a story her of what it is like to grow up with a hugely successful, domineering, morally certain father, a mother who embodied the joys of intimacy but with other women - and of what the costs of public success from such a complex background are.

I'm not the friend that's gonna just agree with you because we're friends. If you're wrong, you're wrong. So be mad, I'll fucking talk to you later.

What have I that makes you seek my friendship? What could lead you O my Jesus, To stand at my door covered with frost, Through the dark winter nights. Oh, how hard my heart was In not opening its door to you! What strange madness That the cold ice of my ingratitude Should dry the wounds of your poor feet! How many times has my Angel told me: ‘Soul, look out of your window right now And you’ll see how lovingly he keeps knocking!’ And how many times, sovereign beauty, I answered, ‘Tomorrow we will open to him,’ Only to answer the very same thing the next day![25

A handsome, cosmopolitan forty-three-year-old, Gebhardt had been a decorated World War I flying ace, serving in the squadron of Manfred von Richthofen, the legendary “Red Baron.” Following the war, he had earned his doctorate degree in political economy from Frankfurt University with a dissertation on “The International Trade in Machinery.” After a brief teaching stint, he had gone into business, earning a fortune in the automobile and locomotive industries before establishing a highly successful import-export firm that specialized in “exchanging German raw material for American commodities.” Charming, cultured, fluent in several languages, he also harbored political ambitions and had hopes of being named German ambassador to the United States—a fair expectation, given his close friendship with high Nazi officials, particularly Hermann Göring, a fellow Richthofen pilot during the Great War.9

The ten-year reunion had been an odd experience. I’d gone mostly out of curiosity, but had found the evening awkward and anticlimactic. Most people had turned out to be exactly who I’d expected them to be. Our class had produced no celebrities or mega successes. Everyone had extremely mundane and commonplace jobs, except for Donal Larkin’s twin sister Shannon, who’d joined the State Department. There had been a lot of strained small talk with people who didn’t remember me, as well as a few uncomfortable conversations with people I’d forgotten who remembered me well. One woman whose name and face rang no bell whatsoever had proudly produced her yearbook to show off the heartfelt note I’d written to her. There on the page, in my own handwriting, was a lengthy message I had no memory of writing, extolling our meaningful and abiding friendship. The whole experience had been unsettling. I wasn’t particularly looking forward to repeating it, but I supposed since I was on the reunion committee now I had no choice but to attend the thirty-year.

As my father sometimes said, quoting a Hasidic story about a rich man who lives like a poor man out of sympathy, it was better for the rich to eat cake, because when they ate only bread, the poor ate stones.

The kind of intuitive understanding that most of us have for friendship, for family relations, for collegial getting along, Archie had for mo-tors, for power tools, for electricity, plumbing, and construction,for how all things were put together and how they could betaken apart.” He could fix or build anything without any instruction and seemingly without trial and error—an ability that seemed magical to my sister and me. But relationships had him stumped when they moved beyond bantering.

Positive love is when two people are madly in love with each other, and they give the same love to each other. Tenderness, love, respect, friendship, this is the kind of love where one without the other; in life is half a person, they live but they are only going through the motions unfortunately this is when one of them dies, The other dies spiritually. This is the strongest love, if you find it and you have it, you don’t need anything else!

Progressive Era reformers saw themselves as the ones needing protection, like the native plants and animals they did so much to save from invasive species. Accordingly, they granted themselves asylum, turning universities, neighborhoods, and as much of the country as possible into a walled garden. They also created hospitals, graduate schools, and public institutions, but blurred science and social science, illness, intelligence, and inferiority, and kept for themselves the power to define which was which.

How on earth is it that the Irish are today fighting tooth and nail not to enter the war on England's side, after being subjected to British "protection" and blessing for over 700 years? In this connection, we may recall the Irish national rising in 1916. Instead of giving the Irish self-government, England "protected" them by bombing Dublin, deporting 1,000 national Irish and executing their leaders. It was Churchill who was mainly responsible for the cruel mistreatment of the Irish with burning, looting and killing without law and order, because he had said that the Irish had to be put down like mad dogs. Only de Valera was spared, not out of human kindness, but solely because he was an American citizen, and one was anxious to injure the friendship with the United States

The Center Cannot Hold,

For me, the appeal of Prozac was that it addressed the brain but required no thinking. There was no talking your way out of neurosis, no deciphering clues or tracing conflict back to unconscious childhood desire. You took a pill.

cosmetic pharmacology

Freud had insisted that every stray thought was meaningful, and even told you what the meaning was, which made the unconscious more like Levittown than an uncharted deep; you could put up your own posters but the floor plan was poured concrete. In that sense it was, like Marxism, an anti-intellectual magnet for intellectuals. Prozac wasn’t about finding meaning in mental discomfort, or thinking at all. That’s what I found so exciting.

Whereas women often feel their depression and become sad, men more commonly act out their depression in behaviors such as being grumpy, irritable, sullen, discouraged, annoyed, mad, withdrawn, cold, and aloof.

Of course, the other piece of having a male best friend. He often didn’t pick up on subtext, which meant that he usually wasn’t mad at her when she thought that he might be. Because he hadn’t realized she had done anything that should make him mad.

Just for the record, none of us are ever gonna be mad ’cause you woke up screaming, but we are gonna need to make sure you’re alright.”
 “I said I was fine,” I muttered.
 "Yeah, you say that a lot," he retorted, and I saw the flash of his teeth as he grinned. "So far you haven't been fine even once.

The beginning of a beautiful friendship is when you can say whatever is on your mind—even when it sucks to say. I love when people shame my mind. I love when people help me sail a better angle. Man, a tall brick wall of comfortable action is self-imprisonment, but the problem is—we’re conditioned to live in comfortable serenity because our ancestors ran away from predators, but now we run away from uncomfortable conversations. We are all in prison until we unlearn conditioning, live dangerously, and embrace madness, man. Suffering will sing a beautiful symphony. We are flawed creatures, man—blind to perception, man. Perception is poisonous, man. Perception is desiring and fearing, man. Perception is thinking and anything and everything back in time, affecting how you behave right now, man. Unfortunately, what we have here is fear of looking like a fool, kid—oh, how bad I feel for your nut inside a nutcracker—about to go to heaven, man.” I still didn’t want to respond, so I didn’t. “If reality is an illusion and everyone is your crew, man, and you are the skipper driving a sailboat, then speak so I can help you sail a better angle, man.

The psychiatrists lobbying for the Durham decision had broadened their own mandate from illness to mental health, and from the individual to society, and were arguing for a system that would treat crime the same way. If crime was a symptom of illness, then perpetrators were also victims, or at least bystanders of their own behavior. Doctors would act like lawyers, offering exonerating explanations of illness, while lawyers would become like doctors, demanding treatment in place of prison for those who could be healed instead of punished. As expert witnesses, psychiatrists would explain to the jury how a particular disorder, in combination with specific environmental factors, had produced behavior for which a defendant could hardly be held responsible. They would also provide the remedy, which would allow the perpetrator turned patient to return quickly to society as a productive member.

I lay in bed listening to the keys of her manual machine rapping on the paper like heavy rain falling on a tin roof.

in the timelessness of God, future people are as important as we are.

And we are magic talking to itself, noisy and alone. . . . —Anne Sexton, To Bedlam and Part Way Back,

I would rather have Zelda a sane mystic than a mad realist,” F. Scott Fitzgerald told his wife’s psychiatrist.

Michael told me he avoided the library because the only history of England he’d found devoted many pages to Gladstone and only a few to Disraeli, which he took as evidence of antisemitism. But he said he couldn’t read anymore anyway.

that being a man was itself a risk factor for violence,

You can give a rat cancer but you can’t give a rat a thought disorder. Instead of a hoped-for solitary gene “causing” schizophrenia, hundreds of predisposing genes have been identified, interacting in complex and as-yet-unknown ways with environmental factors. The brain has billions of interconnected neurons.

Still, the story hangs over her memoir, and over the history of law and psychiatry, whose marriage, divorce, and rapprochement are still wending their slow, uncertain way through the courts. The young man had needed psychiatric help but had received legal help. Now he needed legal help. Perhaps in jail he would receive psychiatric help.

He carries me on his back the way Aeneas carried Anchises,

My mother had told me more than once about James Joyce bringing his daughter Lucia to see Carl Jung after she was diagnosed with schizophrenia. The writer protested that Lucia was simply doing what he did, playing with language, but Jung told Joyce that he was diving to the bottom of a river; his daughter was sinking.

After watching Huxley turn his model psychosis into a spiritual journey, Dr. Osmond agreed that hallucinatory distortions were in fact something more than mere symptoms. With Huxley’s assistance, he came up with the word “psychedelic,” which means “mind manifesting.

these are not escapes from but enlargements, burgeonings of reality.

He was in his thirties by the time he found the courage, with the help of a psychiatrist, to quit his job, move to San Francisco, live an openly gay life, and write about how he saw “the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.” Most Beat writers had hatched out of asylums, and it was never clear to me if they were the best minds before that happened or because of it.

In other words, I knew the family wasn’t a bourgeois impediment to progress, or a tool of capitalist oppression, but a life raft of resistance in a sea of state tyranny. It was how you preserved and passed on values worth dying for, and was itself one of those values.

If it turned out stories really did write me, instead of the other way around, let me at least choose the ones that spoke to my soul.

came away with a few metaphorically memorable concepts, including the bizarre proposition that two particles could become “entangled” at the quantum level in such a way that anything you did to one particle would happen to the other. Even if they were banished to opposite ends of the universe, they behaved like reciprocating voodoo dolls or invisibly conjoined twins bound to each other’s fate despite billions of light-years between them. Quantum entanglement was so weird that Einstein called it “spooky actions at a distance,

The curse of Greek tragedy, “whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad,” was erased. Now, madness was the first step to recovery, even if it sounded more like philosopher-assisted suicide.

The protesters who had tried to levitate the Pentagon in 1967, with the aid of Allen Ginsberg’s chanting, had somehow lifted up the Kremlin and tipped it over instead. It wasn’t their politics; it was their blue jeans. And the music, which hadn’t died after all.

The children of divorce often had a jilted, defiant aura I envied. They’d learned from warring, unfaithful, self-actualizing mothers and fathers to grab what they could, combining middle-aged desperation and adolescent impulse. Their boldness propelled them toward experiences everyone wanted, even as it set them apart, and you could never be entirely sure whether they were pursuing pleasure or self-destruction. The confusion was part of the fascination.

At dawn, King Lír rose up and saddled his horse. Before he mounted, he said to Schmendrick and Molly, “I would like it if you came to see me one day.” They assured him that they would, but still he lingered with them, twisting the dangling reins about his fingers. “I dreamed about her last night!” he said. Molly cried, “So did I!” and Schmendrick opened his mouth, and then closed it again. King Lír said hoarsely, “By our friendship, I beg you—tell me what she said to you.” His hands gripped one hand of each of theirs, and his clutch was cold and painful. Schmendrick gave him a weak smile. “My lord, I so rarely remember my dreams. It seems to me that we spoke solemnly of silly things, as one does—grave nonsense, empty and evanescent—” The king let go of his hand and turned his half-mad gaze on Molly Grue. “I’ll never tell,” she said, a little frightened, but flushing oddly. “I remember, but I’ll never tell anyone, if I die for it—not even you, my lord.” She was not looking at him as she spoke, but at Schmendrick. King Lír let her hand fall as well, and he swung himself into the saddle so fiercely that his horse reared up across the sunrise, bugling like a stag. But Lír kept his seat and glared down at Molly and Schmendrick with a face so grim and scored and sunken that he might well have been king as long as Haggard before him. “She said nothing to me,” he whispered. “Do you understand? She said nothing to me, nothing at all.” Then his face softened, as even King Haggard’s face had gone a little gentle when he watched the unicorns in the sea. For that moment he was again the young prince who had liked to sit with Molly in the scullery. He said, “She looked at me. In my dream, she looked at me and never spoke.” He rode away without good-bye, and they watched after him until the hills hid him: a straight, sad horseman, going home to be king.

It was one thing to recognize the terrible toll they could take on the people inside them, and that, thanks in part to new medications, a majority of people with schizophrenia no longer needed to live there. It was something else to know what could replace the state system without destroying the idea of asylum that had given rise to it in the first place, or harming the people the system had been created to help. Hardest of all was to realize that the answers of a moment could not substitute for the slow, hard, complicated, and imperfect work of providing daily practical care for patients whose rights had finally been recognized but whose illness could itself seem like a violation of their reason and will.

Tall and ruddy in the white cable-knit fishing sweater her mother had given him for Christmas, its collar thick as an Elizabethan ruff, Michael arrived like someone carrying gifts even though his arms were empty.

At a highway lookout I stood in the oceanic updraft feeling what Jack Kerouac called “end of the continent sadness.

Thinking

In that twilight mood it was impossible for me to think about anyone without becoming them for a moment, a frighteningly porous state I feared was a kind of madness in itself, until morning came and dispelled it.

G.I. Joes or cap guns, as if the war were sustained by the passions of boys rather than the cold calculations of Ivy League technocrats scheduling our deaths.

the aftermath of Watergate, the Senate’s Church Committee discovered five administrations’ worth of spy agency malfeasance, including the revelation that the CIA had tested mind-altering drugs on American citizens without their knowledge, a veritable Bay of Guinea Pigs sparked by fears during the Korean War that Chinese and Soviet scientists were brainwashing captured American soldiers. One former CIA agent testified that the illicit doping continued long after it was clear there were no mind-control chemicals, because the movie version of The Manchurian Candidate came out, and it “made something impossible look plausible.” Michael and I were children of a time when a “thought experiment” meant something more than Einstein imagining a beam of light on a trolley. A movie about a foreign conspiracy to brainwash Americans and destroy the country had served as

One generation’s brainwashing was another generation’s mental hygiene. This, too, shaped our world. The psychiatrist’s office ransacked in 1971, with its broken file cabinet (now in the Smithsonian), turns out to be a fitter symbol than the hotel burgled in 1972, not only of the decade’s political fiascoes, and the years leading up to them, but of disasters yet to come whose seeds were already planted.

schizophrenic,’ ” Foderaro

Madness calls literature’s bluff by going beyond it and falling short of it at the same time. When Bloom wrote that “schizophrenia is bad poetry, for the schizophrenic has lost the strength of perverse, wilful, misprision,” he meant that in order to read something “wrong,” there had to be a way to read it right. There had to be truth, whether or not you acknowledged it, instead of mere illusion.

Art can’t be the lie that tells the truth in a world that cannot recognize lies.

Friends get mad at each other sometimes. Then they get over it and forgive each other and go back to being friends again.

I shook my head, feeling stupid. Hating that I felt stupid. Because the truth was, I didn’t want the solution to midlife to be young again. I wanted to be accepted for being my age. I wanted it to be okay for a woman to have wrinkles. Graying hair. A few sagging areas due to child birth and the passing of years. As a woman excited to start this new chapter, I wanted to feel…normal. Accepted. But the truth was, I didn’t feel accepted. I didn’t feel acknowledged for my service in raising the next generation, for my active role in the community, or even for being human sometimes. I felt utterly ignored. I felt invisible or, worse, frowned upon. Most of the time, when I looked in the mirror, I saw only my flaws. I saw all the things that advertisements and social media said was wrong with me. I wanted to focus on what was right about this version of myself, like the way I’d learned to take life a little slower and enjoy each moment. Like my appreciation for people’s differences, and for beauty found in unlikely places. For my friendships, new and old. I wanted it to be okay that I wasn’t worried about beauty anymore, or worried about looking young. I just wanted to look like me, however me looked in any given year.

The brain is the body, and the body lives in the present, which is all there is.

I thought the salt was arsenic,” Michael told me once. “I thought pepper was the ashes of our people.” “What do you do with a thought like that?” I asked him. “Suffer.

I have a suspicion that you are all mad," said Dr. Renard, smiling sociably; "but God forbid that madness should in any way interrupt friendship. Let us go round to the garage.

it was a “fact of social evolution,” as Nunn put it in 1920, that “spiritual leadership is the work of the few” to feel rightfully singled out.

To which the guru, much like R. D. Laing, had replied that for the sensitive and intelligent person living in a crazy world, the choices were madness, suicide, or becoming a sannyasin, a follower of his teaching.

When I told my Berkeley therapist that I was having panic attacks in the elevator of International House, he asked me why, as if they were voluntary. He cut me off before I could point the finger at childhood beatings, the Holocaust, or the Freudian saga of the dwarf cherry tree from Cooper’s Nursery that turned out to be full-size, outraging my mother, who had me lop the top off every fall. “Here’s why,” he said, tapping the eraser of his pencil against the dome of his conveniently shaven head, high above his eyes. “They’re called frontal lobes.” I laughed but he did not. It was a simple fact, he said, that the brain had evolved in stages and the parts fit together badly. Thinking caused anxiety the way walking upright caused backaches. Our ability to remember the past, imagine the future, and use language, all recent acquisitions, did not mesh well with ancient regions of the brain that had guarded us for eons, knew only the present, and did not distinguish between imaginary fears and real trouble. Fair enough, but why was it my frontal lobes’ fault if the primitive portion of my brain was too drunk on limbic moonshine to distinguish between real and imaginary monsters? Because, he told me, there is no difference between real and imaginary monsters, just as there is no difference between the past and the future: neither exists. Unless I wanted to spend the rest of my life on the elevator floor, I had better realize that the brain isn’t an intellectual, any more than the stomach is a gourmet. The brain is the body, and the body lives in the present, which is all there is.

how a cruel culture betrays its best minds and drives them into conformity and madness.

Along with his familiar confidence, there was an unfamiliar undertow of agitation pulling everything he said in the opposite direction. He