“
I don't have pet peeves - I have major psychotic fucking hatreds.
”
”
George Carlin
“
A ghostly smile flickered across his face. "If you weren't so psychotic, you'd be fun to hang around."
"Funny, I feel that way about you too." He didn't say anything else, but the smile grew, and he walked away.
”
”
Richelle Mead (Vampire Academy (Vampire Academy, #1))
“
The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.
”
”
David Foster Wallace
“
I'm not psycho...I just like psychotic things.
”
”
Gerard Way
“
A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on. A psychotic is a guy who's just found out what's going on.
”
”
William S. Burroughs
“
I was glad I wasn't in love, that I wasn't happy with the world. I like being at odds with everything. People in love often become edgy, dangerous. They lose their sense of perspective. They lose their sense of humor. They become nervous, psychotic bores. They even become killers.
”
”
Charles Bukowski (Women)
“
Ironically enough, the only people who can hold up indefinitely under the stress of modern war are psychotics. Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity.
”
”
Aldous Huxley (Brave New World Revisited)
“
I want women -- and men -- to feel empowered by a deeper and more psychotic part of themselves. The part they're always trying desperately to hide. I want that to become something that they cherish.
”
”
Lady Gaga
“
The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.
”
”
Joseph Campbell (Psychology of the Future: Lessons from Modern Consciousness Research (Suny Series in Transpersonal and Humanistic Psychology))
“
Unfortunately, some family members are so psychotic that no matter how hard you try to forge a healthy relationship, nothing will help. Now that you're an adult, take refuge in the fact that some things are beyond your control. You owe it to yourself to steer clear of people who are harmful to your health.
”
”
Andrea Lavinthal (Your So-Called Life: A Guide to Boys, Body Issues, and Other Big-Girl Drama You Thought You Would Have Figured Out by Now)
“
For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity.
”
”
Jean Dubuffet
“
Barrons was powerful, broodingly good-looking, insanely wealthy, frighteningly intelligent, and had exquisite taste, not to mention a hard body that emitted some kind of constant low-level charge. Bottom line: He was the stuff of heroes.
And psychotic killers.
”
”
Karen Marie Moning (Faefever (Fever, #3))
“
You are enough to drive a saint to madness or a king to his knees.
”
”
Grace Willows (To Kiss a King)
“
My best advice is to be yourself. Unless you’re psychotic, then you might want to try a different tactic.
”
”
Gwen Hayes (So Over You)
“
All families are psychotic. Everybody has basically the same family - it's just reconfigured slightly different from one to the next.
”
”
Douglas Coupland (All Families are Psychotic)
“
That was cool.'
You're psychotic.
”
”
Brandon Mull (Grip of the Shadow Plague (Fablehaven, #3))
“
LSD is a psychedelic drug which occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have NOT taken it.
”
”
Timothy Leary
“
Is it romantic or psychotic when I say I'll never let you leave me?
”
”
R.K. Lilley (Grounded (Up in the Air, #3))
“
attempting to write yourself as a protagonist in the life of someone else is psychotically narcissistic.
”
”
Malcolm Collins (The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life: A Guide to Creating Your Own Answers to Life’s Biggest Questions (The Pragmatist's Guide))
“
Wake up, Astrid. Your psychotic criminal is playing with knives. (Sasha)
”
”
Sherrilyn Kenyon (Dance with the Devil (Dark-Hunter, #3))
“
I whirled around and saw no one. No psychotic mad scientists, anyway.
"Jackpot, Max! Jackpot!" It was was Fang, and he was giggling hysterically.
For those of you just joining us, Fang doesn't giggle. Especially hysterically.
So for a second, this seemed like one of the weirder dreams of recent days.
”
”
James Patterson (Fang (Maximum Ride, #6))
“
What kind of rat bastard psychotic would play that song- right now, at this moment?
”
”
Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas)
“
I want us to be... what is your word? Friends."
"Psychotic rapists don't have friends."
"I was unaware you were a psychotic rapists or I would not have offered."
(Mac & V'lane)
”
”
Karen Marie Moning (Bloodfever (Fever, #2))
“
Suddenly, Shelby started, at the same time that we heard Cole's voice across the backyard: "Clear off, you psychotic bitch!"
She slid off into the darkness as the back door slammed.
"Thanks, Cole," I said. "That was incredibly subtle."
"That," replied Cole, "is one of my finest traits.
”
”
Maggie Stiefvater (Forever (The Wolves of Mercy Falls, #3))
“
Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move.
”
”
David Foster Wallace
“
Depression is a painfully slow, crashing death. Mania is the other extreme, a wild roller coaster run off its tracks, an eight ball of coke cut with speed. It's fun and it's frightening as hell. Some patients - bipolar type I - experience both extremes; other - bipolar type II - suffer depression almost exclusively. But the "mixed state," the mercurial churning of both high and low, is the most dangerous, the most deadly. Suicide too often results from the impulsive nature and physical speed of psychotic mania coupled with depression's paranoid self-loathing.
”
”
David Lovelace (Scattershot: My Bipolar Family)
“
Who the hell would attack the Steel Horse anyway? What was the thinking behind that? “Here is a bar full of psychotic killers who grow giant claws and people who pilot the undead for a living. I think I’ll go wreck the place.
”
”
Ilona Andrews (Magic Bleeds (Kate Daniels, #4))
“
I’m a bloodydamn Helldiver with an army of giant, mildly psychotic women behind me and a fleet of state-of-the-art warships crewed by pissed-off pirates, engineers, techs, and former slaves.
”
”
Pierce Brown (Morning Star (Red Rising, #3))
“
The nutritionist said I should eat root vegetables.
Said if I could get down thirteen turnips a day
I would be grounded, rooted.
Said my head would not keep flying away
to where the darkness lives.
The psychic told me my heart carries too much weight.
Said for twenty dollars she’d tell me what to do.
I handed her the twenty. She said, “Stop worrying, darling.
You will find a good man soon.”
The first psycho therapist told me to spend
three hours each day sitting in a dark closet
with my eyes closed and ears plugged.
I tried it once but couldn’t stop thinking
about how gay it was to be sitting in the closet.
The yogi told me to stretch everything but the truth.
Said to focus on the out breath. Said everyone finds happiness
when they care more about what they give
than what they get.
The pharmacist said, “Lexapro, Lamicatl, Lithium, Xanax.”
The doctor said an anti-psychotic might help me
forget what the trauma said.
The trauma said, “Don’t write these poems.
Nobody wants to hear you cry
about the grief inside your bones.”
But my bones said, “Tyler Clementi jumped
from the George Washington Bridge
into the Hudson River convinced
he was entirely alone.”
My bones said, “Write the poems.
”
”
Andrea Gibson (The Madness Vase)
“
Think of God and not religion, of ecstasy and not mysticism. The difference between the theoretician of faith and the believer is as great as between the psychiatrist and the psychotic.
”
”
Emil M. Cioran
“
His eyes are wild, psychotic slits that bat-dance in your soul looking for good things to crush or bad elements to identify with.
”
”
Irvine Welsh
“
Thorne’s voice pitched high in imitation of the queen. “The impostor of my beloved niece is vanquished … Let us put this messiness behind us while we go forward with the coronations … I am a psychotic, power-hungry nut basket and my breath smells really bad under this veil.
”
”
Marissa Meyer (Winter (The Lunar Chronicles, #4))
“
She was a ray of sunshine, a warm summer rain, a bright fire on a cold winter’s day, and now she could be dead because she had tried to save the man she loved.
”
”
Grace Willows
“
Don't go alone," Lend said, his voice tight with concern.
"I'll take Jack."
"Oh, wonderful, take the other psychotic guy in your life to go find the first one.
”
”
Kiersten White (Endlessly (Paranormalcy, #3))
“
Your psychotic behavior and constant temper tantrums intrigue me.
”
”
Coco J. Ginger
“
What do you think he wants?”…
“Don’t ask me, I’m not a psychotic maniac.” He paused. “Well, not as much of a psychotic maniac.
”
”
Julie Kagawa (The Eternity Cure (Blood of Eden, #2))
“
Minds that have withered into psychosis are far more terrifying than any character of fiction.
”
”
Christian Baloga
“
Say what you want. Being a psychotic asshole has it's perks.
”
”
Jamie McGuire (Walking Disaster (Beautiful, #2))
“
We used to be pretty good friends, but fourteen-year-old girls are psychotic.
”
”
Jesse Andrews (Me and Earl and the Dying Girl)
“
...blame is just a lazy person's way of making sense of chaos.
”
”
Douglas Coupland (All Families are Psychotic)
“
I can't take you tonight," I say. "I had my heart completely broken about an hour ago by a psychotic bitch and I need a little more time to recover from that relationship. How about tomorrow night?
”
”
Colleen Hoover (Finding Cinderella (Hopeless, #2.5))
“
I used to say to my classes that the ways to get insight are: to study infants; to study animals; to study primitive people; to be psychoanalyzed; to have a religious conversion and get over it; to have a psychotic episode and get over it; or to have a love affair with an old Russian. And I stopped saying that when a little dancer in the front row put up her hand and said, 'Does he have to be old?
”
”
Margaret Mead
“
Are you sure you want to go out with someone with that kind of history? ...He could have a psychotic break. I read that people get those when they're twenty-eight.
”
”
Maggie Stiefvater (Shiver (The Wolves of Mercy Falls, #1))
“
I know you all have families who love you so if you want to leave–. (Acheron)
We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t want to. You and Val fought to save my sister when no one else would have bothered. I haven’t forgotten it. (Vane)
And I haven’t forgotten what the Dark-Hunters did for me and Maggie. (Wren)
Yeah, we’re family. Psychotic, bizarre and a hodgepodge of personalities that should probably never be blended, but here we are. Now let’s go kick some ass. (Fury)
”
”
Sherrilyn Kenyon (Acheron (Dark-Hunter, #14))
“
This would be a bad time for someone to look over and recognize you. They’d probably think I was kidnapping you.” “You are, in a manner.” “No. I’m saving you from your psychotic stepmother. There’s a difference.
”
”
Marissa Meyer (Winter (The Lunar Chronicles, #4))
“
The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic. But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.
The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire.
”
”
Audre Lorde (Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power)
“
Nick’s right, you are psychotic. (Talon)
The correct term is sociopathic and yes, I am. But at least I have no delusions about myself. (Zarek)
Meaning? (Talon)
Take your meaning wherever you can find it. (Zarek)
”
”
Sherrilyn Kenyon (Night Embrace (Dark-Hunter, #2))
“
They want to be the agents, not the victims, of history. They identify with God's power and believe they are godlike. That is their basic madness. They are overcome by some archtype; their egos have expanded psychotically so that they cannot tell where they begin and the godhead leaves off. It is not hubris, not pride; it is inflation of the ego to its ultimate — confusion between him who worships and that which is worshipped. Man has not eaten God; God has eaten man.
”
”
Philip K. Dick (The Man in the High Castle)
“
If anyone asks you if you’re taken,” I said, “the answer is yes.”
“I think I can live with that,” he promised.
“Good,” I said. “Because you don’t want to see me be cross.”
“Too late.”
“Shut up and dance, Walt.”
“Shut up and dance, Walt.”
We did—with the music of a psychotic griffin screaming behind us, and the sirens and horns of Brooklyn wailing below. It was quite romantic.
”
”
Rick Riordan (The Serpent's Shadow (The Kane Chronicles, #3))
“
Harmony glanced to her left, and my gaze followed hers to the living room, where my aunt had died, my cousin had been restored, and I'd whacked a psychotic grim reaper with a cast-iron skillet.
Weirdest. Tuesday. Ever.
”
”
Rachel Vincent (My Soul to Take (Soul Screamers, #1))
“
He almost danced to the fridge, found the three least hairy things in it, put them on a plate and watched them intently for two minutes. Since they made no attempt to move within that time he called them breakfast and ate them. Between them they killed a virulent space disease he'd picked up without knowing it in the Flargathon Gas Swamps a few days earlier, which otherwise would have killed off half the population of the Western Hemisphere, blinded the other half, and driven everyone else psychotic and sterile, so the Earth was lucky there.
”
”
Douglas Adams (So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #4))
“
This means that I don't have to run faster than the psychotic-maniac-vampire-cannibal, I just have to run faster than whoever is with me when the psychotic-maniac-vampire-cannibal starts chasing us.
”
”
Jim Benton (Okay, So Maybe I Do Have Superpowers (Dear Dumb Diary #11))
“
Let the psychotics take over. They alone understood what was happening.
”
”
J.G. Ballard (High-Rise)
“
She thought about her life and how lost she’d felt for most of it. She thought about the way that all truths she’d been taught to consider valuable invariably conflicted with the world as it was actually lived. How could a person be so utterly lost, yet remain living?
”
”
Douglas Coupland (All Families are Psychotic)
“
Are you done acting like a psychotic, cracked-out Muppet baby?" he asked, and I could tell by the way his fingers spasmed around my wrists, he really wanted to shake me.
"Or do you need a couple more moments to return to sanity? I have all day. And you actually feel kind of good under me, so take your time.
”
”
Jennifer L. Armentrout (Obsession)
“
There’s nothing creepier than having a psychotic Apollyon caged in the basement.
”
”
Jennifer L. Armentrout (Apollyon (Covenant, #4))
“
Childhood is cannibals and psychotics vomiting in your mouth!
”
”
Maurice Sendak
“
We really must understand that the lust for affluence in contemporary society is psychotic. It is psychotic because it has completely lost touch with reality. We crave things we neither need nor enjoy. 'We buy things we do not want to impress people we do not like.' ...It is time to awaken to the fact that conformity to a sick society is to be sick.
”
”
Richard J. Foster (Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth)
“
I think we are all psychotic, the children of the Underworld.
”
”
Frank Lambert (Ghost Doors)
“
Doubt is to certainty as neurosis is to psychosis. The neurotic is in doubt and has fears about persons and things; the psychotic has convictions and makes claims about them. In short, the neurotic has problems, the psychotic has solutions.
”
”
Thomas Szasz
“
Yes, and for the record, he thinks you’re insane, too. (Otto)
Oh, goodie. But I guess that’s only fair since I think he’s psychotic. (Susan)
”
”
Sherrilyn Kenyon (Dark Side of the Moon (Dark-Hunter, #9; Were-Hunter, #3))
“
In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like winnicott's psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.
”
”
Roland Barthes
“
I'm sure that you psychotic necro-wannabes with delusions of godhood are all about sharing with your fellow maniacs.
”
”
Jim Butcher (Dead Beat (The Dresden Files, #7))
“
I lowered the gun but didn’t holster it. Not just yet. She could turn out to be psychotic. Or a door-to-door salesperson.
”
”
Darynda Jones (Fourth Grave Beneath My Feet (Charley Davidson, #4))
“
Holy psychotic PCs, Robin, we’ve a murderous MacBook on the loose!
”
”
Karen Marie Moning (Feversong (Fever, #9))
“
Traumatic events, by definition, overwhelm our ability to cope. When the mind becomes flooded with emotion, a circuit breaker is thrown that allows us to survive the experience fairly intact, that is, without becoming psychotic or frying out one of the brain centers. The cost of this blown circuit is emotion frozen within the body. In other words, we often unconsciously stop feeling our trauma partway into it, like a movie that is still going after the sound has been turned off. We cannot heal until we move fully through that trauma, including all the feelings of the event.
”
”
Susan Pease Banitt (The Trauma Tool Kit: Healing PTSD from the Inside Out)
“
Why have you chosen to spare me?”
“I want us to be…what is your word? Friends.”
“Psychotic rapists don’t have friends.”
“I was unaware you were a psychotic rapist or I would not have offered.”
“Ha.” I’d set myself up for that one.
”
”
Karen Marie Moning (Bloodfever (Fever, #2))
“
Psychotic rapists don't have friends."
"I was unaware you were a psychotic rapist or I would not have offered."
"Ha."
-Mac and V'Lane
”
”
Karen Marie Moning
“
For a brief second, I entertained the idea of ripping off my gloves, rushing down the hall, and jumping on Dustin’s back like a psychotic monkey.
”
”
Jennifer L. Armentrout (Cursed)
“
You know what we need? We need to get jobs, get the fuck out of that crazy house,' Natalie said, dipping a McNugget into her sauce.
Yeah, right. Jobs doing what? Our only skills are oral sex and restraining agitated psychotics.
”
”
Augusten Burroughs (Running with Scissors)
“
I'm sure I must have sounded like a fool and a borderline psychotic most of that year, when I talked to people who thought they knew who and where they were at the time ... but looking back, I see that if I wasn't Right, at least I wasn't Wrong, and in that context I was forced to learn from my confusion ... which took awhile, and there's still no proof that what I finally learned was Right, but there's not a hell of a lot of evidence to show that I'm Wrong either.
”
”
Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist, 1968-1976)
“
Moods are such an essential part of the substance of life, of one's notion of oneself, that even psychotic extremes in mood and behavior somehow can be seen as temporary, even understandable, reactions to what life has dealt.
”
”
Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)
“
Every single person is a fool, insane, a failure, or a bad person to at least ten people.
”
”
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
“
many individuals going beyond the ‘normal’ limits of fragmentation are classified as paranoid, schizoid, psychotic, etc.
”
”
David Bohm (Wholeness and the Implicate Order (Routledge Classics))
“
Pilots are never ‘peachy,’ girl. We’re spirited.” “Or,” I added, “briskly energized by the prospect of dealing death to the coming enemies.” “Or that,” Cobb said. “If you’re psychotic.
”
”
Brandon Sanderson (Skyward (Skyward, #1))
“
Nuala, can we just have, like, a cease-fire? I mean, you can go back to calling me an ass and trying to lure me to my death tomorrow and I'll go back to treating you like a psychotic bitch and researching ways to exorcise you in the morning, but seriously, can we just have a cease-fire for tonight?
”
”
Maggie Stiefvater (Ballad: A Gathering of Faerie (Books of Faerie, #2))
“
Good God, Dev. Have you completely lost your mind? Don’t tease the psychotic tiger. He’s getting all angry and frothing at the mouth. Someone’s going to think he’s rabid. (Serre)
Yeah, but teasing him is like throwing meat at Kyle. It’s highly entertaining. (Dev)
”
”
Sherrilyn Kenyon (Unleash the Night (Dark Hunter, #8; Were-Hunter, #2))
“
All of the diagnoses that you deal with - depression, anxiety, ADHD, bipolar illness, post traumatic stress disorder, even psychosis, are significantly rooted in trauma. They are manifestations of trauma. Therefore the diagnoses don't explain anything. The problem in the medical world is that we diagnose somebody and we think that is the explanation. He's behaving that way because he is psychotic. She's behaving that way because she has ADHD. Nobody has ADHD, nobody has psychosis - these are processes within the individual. It's not a thing that you have. This is a process that expresses your life experience. It has meaning in every single case.
”
”
Gabor Maté
“
You're - psychotic. There's something wrong with you."
"I know," Benteley agreed. "I'm a sick man. And the more I see, the sicker I get. I'm so sick I think everybody else is sick and I'm the only healthy person. That's pretty bad off, isn't it?
”
”
Philip K. Dick (Solar Lottery)
“
They carried on sniping in the front seat, and Mae turned back to Jamie.
"You doing okay?" she murmured.
"Yes," said Jamie, a bit too earnestly. "I love you, Mae. Your hair is the color of flamingos! And I love Nick as well." He gazed soulfully in Nick's direction. "Sometimes when you are not being psychotic, you are quite funny. And you!" He regarded Seb for a long moment. "No, I still don't like you," he decided. "Maybe I need another drink."
"I don't think so," Nick said.
”
”
Sarah Rees Brennan (The Demon's Covenant)
“
Last year I kissed this freshman girl at a pool party and she wouldn’t get off my nuts for six months. Which is why my policy is now no psychotics, and no freshmen. The freshmen thing is obviously easy to avoid, while the psychotics pose a bit more of a problem. It’s not like girls walk around with “I’m crazy” stamped on their chests.
”
”
Lauren Barnholdt (Two-Way Street)
“
Oh honey, someday a real man is going to make you see stars and you won't even be looking at the sky."
Excerpt from Grace Willow's Last Minute Bride
”
”
Grace Willows
“
I want you to write like Alice Munro. Stir the world. Make people see the horror; show them their suffering relatives; show them that they’re not safe. Let them know that they can’t even begin to imagine what’s happening here. By making my reality more compelling than reality television is the only way you’ll get their attention.
Psychotic and cynical.
Who can tell the difference anymore between a severed head and a special effect? Can you? I doubt it, and I know you’ve been in the middle of it all and seen the damage first-hand.
”
”
John Payton Foden (Magenta)
“
Am I racially kin to this man? Baynes wondered. So closely so that for all intents and purposes it is the same? Then it is in me, too, the psychotic streak. A psychotic world we live in. The madmen are in power. How long have we known this? Faced this? And—how many of us do know it?
”
”
Philip K. Dick (The Man in the High Castle)
“
Dropping in and out of your own life (for psychotic breaks, or treatment in a hospital) isn’t like getting off a train at one stop and later getting back on at another. Even if you can get back on (and the odds are not in your favor), you’re lonely there. The people you boarded with originally are far, far ahead of you, and now you’re stuck playing catch-up.
”
”
Elyn R. Saks (The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness)
“
When all the media assertions were put together, the police appeared to be hunting for a psychotic lesbian who had joined a cult of Satanists that propagandized for S&M sex and hated society in general and men in particular. Because Salander had been abroad for the past year, there might be international connections too.
”
”
Stieg Larsson (The Girl Who Played With Fire (Millennium #2))
“
Don't worry, he's coming with me to investigate things."
"In the city?" Jim asked.
"Yes."
"That's a great idea. You both should go. To the city."
Curran and I looked at each other.
"He's trying to get rid of us," I said.
"You think he's planning a coup?" Curran wondered.
"I hope so." I turned to Jim. "Is there any chance you'd overthrow the tyrannical Beast Lord and his psychotic Consort?"
"Yeah, I want a vacation," Curran said.
Jim leaned toward us and said in a lowered voice, "You couldn't pay me enough. This is your mess, you deal with it. I have enough on my plate."
He walked away.
"Too bad," Curran said.
"I don't know, I think we could convince him to seize the reins of power."
Curran shook his head. "Nahh. He's too smart for that.
”
”
Ilona Andrews (Magic Gifts (Kate Daniels, #5.6))
“
A gunshot rang out, blasting a hole in the door. A crossbow quarrel zinged through the hole and stuck quivering into the opposite wall. Seth heard the rocking horse clattering down the staircase, the twang of bowstrings, and the overlapping beat of several other projectiles thudding against the door.
"That was awesome," Seth told Kendra.
"You're psychotic," Kendra replied.
”
”
Brandon Mull (Grip of the Shadow Plague (Fablehaven, #3))
“
the intensity, glory, and absolute assuredness if my mind's flight made it very difficult for me to believe once i was better, that the illness was one i should willingly give up....moods are such an essential part of the substance of life, of one's notion of oneself, that even psychotic extremes in mood and behavior somehow can be seen as temporary, even understandable reactions to what life has dealt....even though the depressions that inevitably followed nearly cost me my life.
”
”
Kay Redfield Jamison
“
No religion I ever encountered made any sense. None are consistent. Most gods are megalomaniacs and paranoid psychotics by their worshippers' description. I don't see how they could survive their own insanity. But it's not impossible that human beings are incapable of interpreting a power so much greater than themselves. Maybe religions are twisted and perverted shadows of truth. Maybe there are forces which shape the world. I myself have never understood why, in a universe so vast, a god would care about something so trivial as worship or human destiny.
”
”
Glen Cook (The White Rose (The Chronicles of the Black Company, #3))
“
Because you have no survival instinct, Grace. You're like a tank, you just chug along< thinking nothing can stop you, until you meet up with a bigger tank. Are you sure you want to go out with someone with that kind of history?" mom seemed to warm her theory. " he couldhave a psychotic break. I read that people get those when they're twenty-eight. he could be almost normal and then suddenly go slasher. I mean, you know I've never told you what to do with your life before now. But what if-I told you not to see him?"
I hadn't been expecting that. My voice was brittle. "I would say that by virtue of your not acting parental up to this point, you've relinquished your abiblity to wield any power now. Sam and I are together. It's not an option."
Mom threw her hands up as if trying to stop the Grace-tank from running over her. "Okay. Fine. Just be careful, okay? Whatever. I'm going to get a drink."
And just like that her parental engergies were expendede.
”
”
Maggie Stiefvater (Shiver (The Wolves of Mercy Falls, #1))
“
Hi, my name is Ashley, and I’ll be your Harbinger today. I will be acting as an interim instructor for all your necromancy needs.” She flashed her best stewardess smile and gave a little Vanna wave.
“Ashley, as delighted as I am to meet you, don’t you think it might be hard to teach me? I’m in a cage that you can’t get into. Oh, and—” I grabbed the bars with both hands, “I’m a little distracted right now by the fact that I’m being held by a psychotic killer.”
Ashley cocked a single eyebrow, a look of mild amusement on her face. “Geez,” she said, looking at Brid. “Is he always this big of a drama queen?
”
”
Lish McBride (Hold Me Closer, Necromancer (Necromancer, #1))
“
Chronic trauma (according to the meaning I propose) that occurs early in life has profound effects on personality development and can lead to the development of dissociative identity disorder (DID), other dissociative disorders, personality disorders, psychotic thinking, and a host of symptoms such as anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and substance abuse. In my view, DID is simply an extreme version of the dissociative structure of the psyche that characterizes us all.
”
”
Elizabeth F. Howell (The Dissociative Mind)
“
According to Thomas, the city [of Bath] had once been a veritable hotbed of manifestations, with every sorcerer, bunyip, golem, goblin, pict, pixie, demon, thylacine, gorgon, moron, cult, scum, mummy, rummy, groke, sphinx, minx, muse, flagellant, diva, reaver, weaver, reaper, scabbarder, scabmettler, dwarf, midget, little person, leprechaun, marshwiggle, totem, soothsayer, truthsayer, hatter, hattifattener, imp, panwere, mothman, shaman, flukeman, warlock, morlock, poltergeist, zeitgeist, elemental, banshee, manshee, lycanthrope, lichenthrope, sprite, wight, aufwader, harpy, silkie, kelpie, klepto, specter, mutant, cyborg, balrog, troll, ogre, cat in shoes, dog in a hat, psychic and psychotic seemingly having decided that this was the hot spot to visit.
”
”
Daniel O'Malley (The Rook (The Checquy Files, #1))
“
The LSD phenomenon, on the other hand, is—to me at least—more interesting. It is an intentionally achieved schizophrenia, with the expectation of a spontaneous remission—which, however, does not always follow. Yoga, too, is intentional schizophrenia: one breaks away from the world, plunging inward, and the ranges of vision experienced are in fact the same as those of a psychosis. But what, then, is the difference? What is the difference between a psychotic or LSD experience and a yogic, or a mystical? The plunges are all into the same deep inward sea; of that there can be no doubt. The symbolic figures encountered are in many instances identical (and I shall have something more to say about those in a moment). But there is an important difference. The difference—to put it sharply—is equivalent simply to that between a diver who can swim and one who cannot. The mystic, endowed with native talents for this sort of thing and following, stage by stage, the instruction of a master, enters the waters and finds he can swim; whereas the schizophrenic, unprepared, unguided, and ungifted, has fallen or has intentionally plunged, and is drowning.
”
”
Joseph Campbell (Myths to Live By)
“
That dead-eyed anhedonia is but a remora on the ventral flank of the true predator, the Great White Shark of pain. Authorities term this condition clinical depression or involutional depression or unipolar dysphoria. Instead of just an incapacity for feeling, a deadening of soul, the predator-grade depression Kate Gompert always feels as she Withdraws from secret marijuana is itself a feeling. It goes by many names — anguish, despair, torment, or q.v. Burton's melancholia or Yevtuschenko's more authoritative psychotic depression — but Kate Gompert, down in the trenches with the thing itself, knows it simply as It.
It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self's most elementary levels. It is a nausea of the cells and soul. It is an unnumb intuition in which the world is fully rich and animate and un-map-like and also thoroughly painful and malignant and antagonistic to the self, which depressed self It billows on and coagulates around and wraps in Its black folds and absorbs into Itself, so that an almost mystical unity is achieved with a world every constituent of which means painful harm to the self. Its emotional character, the feeling Gompert describes It as, is probably mostly indescribable except as a sort of double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency — sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying — are not just unpleasant but literally horrible.
It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed. There is no way Kate Gompert could ever even begin to make someone else understand what clinical depression feels like, not even another person who is herself clinically depressed, because a person in such a state is incapable of empathy with any other living thing. This anhedonic Inability To Identify is also an integral part of It. If a person in physical pain has a hard time attending to anything except that pain, a clinically depressed person cannot even perceive any other person or thing as independent of the universal pain that is digesting her cell by cell. Everything is part of the problem, and there is no solution. It is a hell for one.
The authoritative term psychotic depression makes Kate Gompert feel especially lonely. Specifically the psychotic part. Think of it this way. Two people are screaming in pain. One of them is being tortured with electric current. The other is not. The screamer who's being tortured with electric current is not psychotic: her screams are circumstantially appropriate. The screaming person who's not being tortured, however, is psychotic, since the outside parties making the diagnoses can see no electrodes or measurable amperage. One of the least pleasant things about being psychotically depressed on a ward full of psychotically depressed patients is coming to see that none of them is really psychotic, that their screams are entirely appropriate to certain circumstances part of whose special charm is that they are undetectable by any outside party. Thus the loneliness: it's a closed circuit: the current is both applied and received from within.
”
”
David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest)
“
The so-called 'psychotically depressed' person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote 'hopelessness' or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling 'Don't!' and 'Hang on!', can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.
”
”
David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest)
“
I suspect almost every day that I’m living for nothing, I get depressed and I feel self-destructive and a lot of the time I don’t like myself. What’s more, the proximity of other humans often fills me with overwhelming anxiety, but I also feel that this precarious sentience is all we’ve got and, simplistic as it may seem, it’s a person’s duty to the potentials of his own soul to make the best of it. We’re all stuck on this often miserable earth where life is essentially tragic, but there are glints of beauty and bedrock joy that come shining through from time to precious time to remind anybody who cares to see that there is something higher and larger than ourselves. And I am not talking about your putrefying gods, I am talking about a sense of wonder about life itself and the feeling that there is some redemptive factor you must at least search for until you drop dead of natural causes.
”
”
Lester Bangs (Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung)
“
Imagine a young Isaac Newton time-travelling from 1670s England to teach Harvard undergrads in 2017. After the time-jump, Newton still has an obsessive, paranoid personality, with Asperger’s syndrome, a bad stutter, unstable moods, and episodes of psychotic mania and depression. But now he’s subject to Harvard’s speech codes that prohibit any “disrespect for the dignity of others”; any violations will get him in trouble with Harvard’s Inquisition (the ‘Office for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion’). Newton also wants to publish Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, to explain the laws of motion governing the universe. But his literary agent explains that he can’t get a decent book deal until Newton builds his ‘author platform’ to include at least 20k Twitter followers – without provoking any backlash for airing his eccentric views on ancient Greek alchemy, Biblical cryptography, fiat currency, Jewish mysticism, or how to predict the exact date of the Apocalypse.
Newton wouldn’t last long as a ‘public intellectual’ in modern American culture. Sooner or later, he would say ‘offensive’ things that get reported to Harvard and that get picked up by mainstream media as moral-outrage clickbait. His eccentric, ornery awkwardness would lead to swift expulsion from academia, social media, and publishing. Result? On the upside, he’d drive some traffic through Huffpost, Buzzfeed, and Jezebel, and people would have a fresh controversy to virtue-signal about on Facebook. On the downside, we wouldn’t have Newton’s Laws of Motion.
”
”
Geoffrey Miller
“
A psychotic world we live in. The madmen are in power. How long have we known this? Faced this?-And-how many of us do know it? Not Lotze. Perhaps if you know you are insane then you are not insane. Or you are becoming sane, finally. Waking up. I suppose only a few are aware of all this. Isolated persons here and there. But the broad masses...what do they think? All these hundreds of thousands in this city, here. Do they imagine that they live in a sane world? Or do they guess, glimpse the truth...?
But, he thought, what does it mean, insane? A legal definition. What do I mean? I feel it, see it, but what is it?
He thought, it is something they do, something they are. It is their unconsciousness. Their lack of knowledge about others. Their not being aware of what they do to others, the destruction they have caused and are causing. No, he thought. That isn't it. I don't know; I sense it, inuit it. But-they are purposely cruel...is that it? No. God, he thought, I can't find it, make it clear. Do they ignore parts of reality? Yes. But it is more. It is their plans. Yes, their plans. The conquering of the planets. Something frenzied and demented, as was their conquering of Africa, and before that, Europe and Asia.
Their view; it is cosmic. Not of man here, a child there, but an abstraction: race, land. Volk. Land. Blut. Ehre. Not of honorable men but of Ehre itself, honor; the abstract is real, the actual is invisible to them. Die Gute, but not good men, this good man. It is their sense of space and time. They see through the here, the now, into the vast black deep beyond, the unchanging. And that is fatal to life. Because eventually there will be no life; there was once only the dust particles in space, the hot hydrogen gases, nothing more, and it will come again. This is an interval, ein Augenblick. The cosmic process is hurrying on, crushing life back into the granite and methane; the wheel turns for all life. It is all temporary. And they-these madmen-respond to the granite, the dust, the longing of the inanimate; they want to aid Natur.
And, he thought, I know why. They want to be the agents, not the victims, of history. They identify with God's power and believe they are godlike. That is their basic madness. They are overcome by some archetype; their egos have expanded psychotically so that they cannot tell where they begin and the godhead leaves off. it is not hubris, not pride; it is inflation of the ego to its ultimate-confusion between him who worships and that which is worshiped. Man has not eaten God; God has eaten man.
What they do not comprehend is man's helplessness. I am weak, small, of no consequence to the universe. It does not notice me; I live on unseen. But why is that bad? Isn't it better that way? Whom the gods notice they destroy. Be small...and you will escape the jealousy of the great.
”
”
Philip K. Dick (The Man in the High Castle)