Sanity Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Sanity. Here they are! All 100 of them:

โ€œ
I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.
โ€
โ€
Edgar Allan Poe
โ€œ
The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four people is suffering from a mental illness. Look at your 3 best friends. If they're ok, then it's you.
โ€
โ€
Rita Mae Brown
โ€œ
It has been said, 'time heals all wounds.' I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessens. But it is never gone.
โ€
โ€
Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy
โ€œ
Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.
โ€
โ€
Mark Twain
โ€œ
Don't worry. You're just as sane as I am.
โ€
โ€
J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Harry Potter, #5))
โ€œ
Sanity is a madness put to good uses.
โ€
โ€
George Santayana (The Essential Santayana: Selected Writings)
โ€œ
If you think anyone is sane you just don't know enough about them.
โ€
โ€
Christopher Moore (Practical Demonkeeping (Pine Cove, #1))
โ€œ
One person's craziness is another person's reality.
โ€
โ€
Tim Burton
โ€œ
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.
โ€
โ€
Shirley Jackson (The Haunting of Hill House)
โ€œ
The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.
โ€
โ€
Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)
โ€œ
I mean, maybe I am crazy. I mean, maybe. But if this is all there is, then I don't want to be sane.
โ€
โ€
Neil Gaiman (Neverwhere (London Below, #1))
โ€œ
Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.
โ€
โ€
C.G. Jung
โ€œ
In a mad world, only the mad are sane.
โ€
โ€
Akira Kurosawa
โ€œ
What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
โ€
โ€
Ursula K. Le Guin
โ€œ
Pardon My Sanity In A World Insane
โ€
โ€
Emily Dickinson
โ€œ
Sanity is not statistical.
โ€
โ€
George Orwell (1984)
โ€œ
A good friend is a connection to life - a tie to the past, a road to the future, the key to sanity in a totally insane world.
โ€
โ€
Lois Wyse
โ€œ
Inside every sane person there's a madman struggling to get out," said the shopkeeper. "That's what I've always thought. No one goes mad quicker than a totally sane person.
โ€
โ€
Terry Pratchett (The Light Fantastic (Discworld, #2; Rincewind, #2))
โ€œ
When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams โ€” this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness โ€” and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!
โ€
โ€
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (Don Quixote)
โ€œ
KILL ME!" And then Newt's eyes cleared, as if he'd gained one last trembling gasp of sanity, and his voice softened. "Please, Tommy. Please." With his heart falling into a black abyss, Thomas pulled the trigger.
โ€
โ€
James Dashner (The Death Cure (The Maze Runner, #3))
โ€œ
Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligenceโ€“ whether much that is gloriousโ€“ whether all that is profoundโ€“ does not spring from disease of thoughtโ€“ from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.
โ€
โ€
Edgar Allan Poe (The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe)
โ€œ
We have now left Reason and Sanity Junction. Next stop, Looneyville.
โ€
โ€
Jim Butcher (Grave Peril (The Dresden Files, #3))
โ€œ
Persistence. Perfection. Patience. Power. Prioritize your passion. It keeps you sane.
โ€
โ€
Criss Jami (Killosophy)
โ€œ
Damn it," I muttered. "What?" asked Adrian. "I hate when you're the sane one. That's my job." "Rose," he said, forcibly trying to keep a serious tone, "I can think of many words to describe you, sexy and hot being at the top of the list. You know what's not on the list? Sane.
โ€
โ€
Richelle Mead (Spirit Bound (Vampire Academy, #5))
โ€œ
I have stolen princesses back from sleeping barrow kings. I burned down the town of Trebon. I have spent the night with Felurian and left with both my sanity and my life. I was expelled from the University at a younger age than most people are allowed in. I tread paths by moonlight that others fear to speak of during day. I have talked to gods, loved women, and written songs that make the minstrels weep. You may have heard of me.
โ€
โ€
Patrick Rothfuss (The Name of the Wind (The Kingkiller Chronicle, #1))
โ€œ
When you're the only sane person, you look like the only insane person.
โ€
โ€
Criss Jami (Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality)
โ€œ
Awareness is the enemy of sanity, for once you hear the screaming, it never stops.
โ€
โ€
Emilie Autumn
โ€œ
The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level๏ปฟ of alienation
โ€
โ€
Terence McKenna
โ€œ
Laugh whenever you can. Keeps you from killing yourself when things are bad. That and vodka.
โ€
โ€
Jim Butcher (Changes (The Dresden Files, #12))
โ€œ
That all men are equal is a proposition which at ordinary times no sane individual has ever given his assent.
โ€
โ€
Aldous Huxley (Proper Studies)
โ€œ
When you come to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.
โ€
โ€
Franklin D. Roosevelt
โ€œ
That millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.
โ€
โ€
Erich Fromm (The Sane Society)
โ€œ
One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.
โ€
โ€
Nikola Tesla
โ€œ
ุฐูˆ ุงู„ุนู‚ู„ู ูŠุดู‚ู‰ ููŠ ุงู„ู†ุนูŠู…ู ุจุนู‚ู„ู‡ู ูˆุฃุฎูˆ ุงู„ุฌู‡ุงู„ุฉู ููŠ ุงู„ุดู‚ุงูˆุฉู ูŠู†ุนู…ู
โ€
โ€
ุฃุจูˆ ุงู„ุทูŠุจ ุงู„ู…ุชู†ุจูŠ
โ€œ
From time to time, I do consider that I might be mad. Like any self-respecting lunatic, however, I am always quick to dismiss any doubts about my sanity.
โ€
โ€
Dean Koontz (Odd Thomas (Odd Thomas, #1))
โ€œ
Collective madness is called sanity ..
โ€
โ€
Paulo Coelho (Veronika Decides to Die)
โ€œ
Too much sanity may be madness โ€” and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!
โ€
โ€
Dale Wasserman (Man of La Mancha: A Musical Play)
โ€œ
And the most terrifying question of all may be just how much horror the human mind can stand and still maintain a wakeful, staring, unrelenting sanity.
โ€
โ€
Stephen King (Pet Sematary)
โ€œ
Actually, the problem is that I canโ€™t lose my mind,โ€ I said. โ€œItโ€™s inescapable.
โ€
โ€
John Green (Turtles All the Way Down)
โ€œ
What I cannot love, I overlook.
โ€
โ€
Anaรฏs Nin
โ€œ
Sanity is a cozy lie.
โ€
โ€
Susan Sontag
โ€œ
To be able to forget means sanity.
โ€
โ€
Jack London (The Star Rover (Modern Library Classics))
โ€œ
The point is, you see," said Ford, "that there is no point in driving yourself mad trying to stop yourself going mad. You might just as well give in and save your sanity for later.
โ€
โ€
Douglas Adams (Life, the Universe and Everything (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #3))
โ€œ
Sanity calms, but madness is more interesting.
โ€
โ€
John Russell
โ€œ
The human mind is not a terribly logical or consistent place.
โ€
โ€
Jim Butcher (Turn Coat (The Dresden Files, #11))
โ€œ
Flirting with madness was one thing; when madness started flirting back, it was time to call the whole thing off.
โ€
โ€
Rohinton Mistry (A Fine Balance)
โ€œ
I sometimes think we must be all mad and that we shall wake to sanity in strait-waistcoats.
โ€
โ€
Bram Stoker (Dracula)
โ€œ
Reading is an escape from the outside world. Everyone needs a little of that to keep their sanity.
โ€
โ€
Kim Holden (Bright Side (Bright Side, #1))
โ€œ
While we read a novel, we are insaneโ€”bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices... Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.
โ€
โ€
Ursula K. Le Guin
โ€œ
Maybe the life I think I'm living is a paranoid delusion...Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.
โ€
โ€
Margaret Atwood (The Handmaidโ€™s Tale (The Handmaid's Tale, #1))
โ€œ
I really believe, or want to believe, really I am nuts, otherwise I'll never be sane.
โ€
โ€
Allen Ginsberg
โ€œ
Where's your sense of adventure?" "Off on a beach somewhere with your sanity?
โ€
โ€
Rachel Caine (Midnight Alley (The Morganville Vampires, #3))
โ€œ
Now this is the point. You fancy me a mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded...
โ€
โ€
Edgar Allan Poe (The Tell-Tale Heart and Other Writings)
โ€œ
This was the door to both sustenance and sanity. And we were each other's key.
โ€
โ€
Suzanne Collins (Mockingjay (The Hunger Games, #3))
โ€œ
To recognize one's own insanity is, of course, the arising of sanity, the beginning of healing and transcendence.
โ€
โ€
Eckhart Tolle (A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose)
โ€œ
You are evidence of your mother's strength, especially if you are a rebellious knucklehead and regardless she has always maintained her sanity.
โ€
โ€
Criss Jami (Killosophy)
โ€œ
River Song: Right then. I have questions, but number one is this - what in the name of sanity have you got on your head? The Doctor: It's a fez. I wear a fez now. Fezzes are cool.
โ€
โ€
Steven Moffat
โ€œ
A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet "for sale", who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence - briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing - cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society. He cannot help doubting himself and his own convictions, if not his sanity. He cannot help suffering, even though he can experience moments of joy and clarity that are absent in the life of his "normal" contemporaries. Not rarely will he suffer from neurosis that results from the situation of a sane man living in an insane society, rather than that of the more conventional neurosis of a sick man trying to adapt himself to a sick society. In the process of going further in his analysis, i.e. of growing to greater independence and productivity,his neurotic symptoms will cure themselves.
โ€
โ€
Erich Fromm (The Art of Being)
โ€œ
When dealing with the insane, the best method is to pretend to be sane.
โ€
โ€
Hermann Hesse
โ€œ
For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity.
โ€
โ€
Jean Dubuffet
โ€œ
Yet mad I am not...and very surely do I not dream.
โ€
โ€
Edgar Allan Poe (The Black Cat)
โ€œ
That she had so completely recovered her sanity was a source of sadness to her. One should never be cured of one's passion.
โ€
โ€
Marguerite Duras (The Ravishing of Lol Stein)
โ€œ
Melancholy suicide. โ€”This is connected with a general state of extreme depression and exaggerated sadness, causing the patient no longer to realize sanely the bonds which connect him with people and things about him. Pleasures no longer attract;
โ€
โ€
ร‰mile Durkheim (Suicide: A Study in Sociology)
โ€œ
I am crazy as hell, but I know it. And knowing it is a kind of sanity that makes the sickness worse.
โ€
โ€
Anne Sexton (Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters)
โ€œ
Sometimes, to regain sanity, one had to acknowledge and embrace the madness.
โ€
โ€
Morgan Rhodes (Rebel Spring (Falling Kingdoms, #2))
โ€œ
She is madness, sanity. She is hell, and paradise.
โ€
โ€
Ellen Hopkins (Perfect (Impulse, #2))
โ€œ
Was everybody seeing this stuff and acting as though they weren't? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?
โ€
โ€
Susanna Kaysen (Girl, Interrupted)
โ€œ
I salute your spunk, but I question your sanity,โ€ Sam said.
โ€
โ€
Libba Bray (The Diviners (The Diviners, #1))
โ€œ
The sole difference between myself and a madman is the fact that I am not mad!
โ€
โ€
Salvador Dalรญ
โ€œ
Humanity can be divided into madmen and cowards. My personal tragedy is in being born into a world where sanity is held to be a character flaw.
โ€
โ€
Mark Lawrence (Prince of Fools (The Red Queen's War, #1))
โ€œ
When the whole world is crazy, it doesn't pay to be sane.
โ€
โ€
Terry Goodkind (The Pillars of Creation (Sword of Truth, #7))
โ€œ
Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity.
โ€
โ€
Herman Melville (Billy Budd, Sailor (Enriched Classics))
โ€œ
maybe a damned good night's sleep will bring me back to a gentle sanity. But at the moment, I look about this room and, like myself, it's all in disarray: things fallen out of place, cluttered, jumbled, lost, knocked over and I can't put it straight, don't want to. Perhaps living through these petty days will get us ready for the dangerous ones.
โ€
โ€
Charles Bukowski
โ€œ
A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity.
โ€
โ€
Robert Frost
โ€œ
for business reasons, I must preserve the outward signs of sanity.
โ€
โ€
Mark Twain
โ€œ
It wouldn't make for sanity would it, living with the devil.
โ€
โ€
Daphne du Maurier (Rebecca)
โ€œ
She surrounded herself with books at work and at home. Her living space was a testament to her first and abiding love with shelves jammed with books tables crowded with them. She saw them not only as knowledge entertainment comfort even sanity but as a kind of artful decoration.
โ€
โ€
Nora Roberts (Key of Knowledge (Key Trilogy, #2))
โ€œ
The distinction between sanity and insanity is narrower than a razorโ€™s edge, sharper than a houndโ€™s tooth, more agile than a mule deer. It is more elusive than the merest phantom. Perhaps it does not even exist; perhaps it is a phantom.
โ€
โ€
Philip K. Dick (VALIS)
โ€œ
The true definition of mental illness is when the majority of your time is spent in the past or future, but rarely living in the realism of NOW.
โ€
โ€
Shannon L. Alder
โ€œ
I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over.
โ€
โ€
Margaret Atwood (Cat's Eye)
โ€œ
I taught him, 'he quavered, "to trust in love. I said:'when love comes, that is reality.' I said: 'Passion does not blind. No. Passion is sanity, and the woman you love, she is the only person you will ever really understand.
โ€
โ€
E.M. Forster (A Room With a View)
โ€œ
Bipolar robs you of that which is you. It can take from you the very core of your being and replace it with something that is completely opposite of who and what you truly are. Because my bipolar went untreated for so long, I spent many years looking in the mirror and seeing a person I did not recognize or understand. Not only did bipolar rob me of my sanity, but it robbed me of my ability to see beyond the space it dictated me to look. I no longer could tell reality from fantasy, and I walked in a world no longer my own.
โ€
โ€
Alyssa Reyans (Letters from a Bipolar Mother (Chronicles of A Fractured Life))
โ€œ
And as much as I'm telling her to stay here, I still want her to choose to come with me. To say fuck sanity and healing and closure. To say that I am the only thing she needs to be well and whole and alive. But we both know that's not true.
โ€
โ€
Katja Millay (The Sea of Tranquility)
โ€œ
Where to look if you've lost your mind?
โ€
โ€
Bernard Malamud (The Fixer)
โ€œ
Much Madness Is Divinest Sense Much Madness is divinest Sense โ€” To a discerning Eye โ€” Much Sense โ€” the starkest Madness โ€” 'Tis the Majority In this, as All, prevail โ€” Assent โ€” and you are sane โ€” Demur โ€” you're straightway dangerous โ€” And handled with a Chain โ€”
โ€
โ€
Emily Dickinson (The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson)
โ€œ
Our society tends to regard as a sickness any mode of thought or behavior that is inconvenient for the system and this is plausible because when an individual doesn't fit into the system it causes pain to the individual as well as problems for the system. Thus the manipulation of an individual to adjust him to the system is seen as a cure for a sickness and therefore as good.
โ€
โ€
Theodore John Kaczynski
โ€œ
The plague of mankind is the fear and rejection of diversity: monotheism, monarchy, monogamy and, in our age, monomedicine. The belief that there is only one right way to live, only one right way to regulate religious, political, sexual, medical affairs is the root cause of the greatest threat to man: members of his own species, bent on ensuring his salvation, security, and sanity.
โ€
โ€
Thomas Szasz
โ€œ
She should have remembered her past experiences in the relationship wars and not let herself get so excited. Evidently her hormones had overruled her common sense and she had become drunk on ovarian wine, the most potent, sanity- destroying substance in the universe.
โ€
โ€
Linda Howard (Mr. Perfect)
โ€œ
Today is filled with anger, fueled with hidden hate. Scared of being outkast, afraid of common fate. Today is build on tragedies which no one want's to face. Nightmares to humanity and morally disgraced. Tonight is filled with Rage, violence in the air. Children bred with ruthlessness cause no one at home cares. Tonight I lay my head down but the pressure never stops, knowing that my sanity content when I'm droped. But tomorrow I see change, a chance to build a new, build on spirit intent of heart and ideas based on truth. Tomorrow I wake with second wind and strong because of pride. I know I fought with all my heart to keep the dream alive.
โ€
โ€
Tupac Shakur
โ€œ
MEMORY'S SO TREACHEROUS. ONE MOMENT YOU'RE LOST IN A CARNIVAL OF DELIGHTS, WITH POIGNANT CHILDHOOD AROMAS , THE FLASHING NEON OF PUBERTY, ALL THAT SENTIMENTAL CANDY-FLOSS ... THE NEXT , IT LEADS YOU SOMEWHERE YOU DON'T WANT TO GO... ...SOMEWHERE DARK AND COLD, FILLED WITH THE DAMP, AMBIGUOUS SHAPES OF THINKS YOU'D HOPED WERE FORGOTTEN. MEMORIES CAN BE VILE, REPULSIVE LITTLE BRUTES. LIKE CHILDREN, I SUPPOSE. HAHA. BUT CAN WE LIVE WITHOUT THEM? MEMORIES ARE WHAT OUR REASON IS BASED UPON. IF WE CAN'T FACE THEM, WE DENY REASON ITSELF! ALGHOUGH, WHY NOT? WE AREN'T CONTRACTUALLY TIED DOWN TO RATIONALITY! THERE IS NO SANITY CLAUSE! SO WHEN YOU FIND YOURSELF LOCKED ONTO AN UNPLEASANT TRAIN OF THOUGHT, HEADING FOR THE PLACES IN YOUR PAST WHERE THE SCREAMING IS UNBEARABLE, REMEMBER THERE'S ALWAYS MADNESS. MADNESS IS THE EMERGENCY EXIT... YOU CAN JUST STEP OUTSIDE, AND CLOSE THE DOOR ON ALL THOSE DREADFUL THINGS THAT HAPPENED. YOU CAN LOCK THEM AWAY... FOREVER.
โ€
โ€
Alan Moore (Batman: The Killing Joke)
โ€œ
I came," she said, "hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy." Cherish it!" cried Hilarious, fiercely. "What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by it's little tentacle, don't let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be.
โ€
โ€
Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49)
โ€œ
Iโ€™ve come to the conclusion that there are no set rules in life. You do what you have to do to survive. If that means running away from the love of your life to preserve your sanity, you do it. If it means breaking someoneโ€™s heart so yours doesnโ€™t break; do it. Life is complicated โ€” too much so for there to be absolutes. We are all so broken. Pick up a person, shake them around and youโ€™ll hear the rattling of their broken pieces. Pieces our fathers broke, or our mothers, or our friends, strangers, or our loves. Olivia has stopped rattling quite as much as she used to. Love is a God-given tool, she tells me. It screws things back in place that were loose, and it cleans out all the broken pieces that you donโ€™t need anymore. I believe her. Our love has been fixing each other. I hope to only hear a tiny jingle when I shake her in a few years
โ€
โ€
Tarryn Fisher (Thief (Love Me with Lies, #3))
โ€œ
Compared to bipolar's magic, reality seems a raw deal. It's not just the boredom that makes recovery so difficult, it's the slow dawning pain that comes with sanity - the realization of illnesss, the humiliating scenes, the blown money and friendships and confidence. Depression seems almost inevitable. The pendulum swings back from transcendence in shards, a bloody, dangerous mess. Crazy high is better than crazy low. So we gamble, dump the pills, and stick it to the control freaks and doctors. They don't understand, we say. They just don't get it. They'll never be artists.
โ€
โ€
David Lovelace (Scattershot: My Bipolar Family)
โ€œ
In every important way we are such secrets from one another, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable - which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, intraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.
โ€
โ€
Marilynne Robinson (Gilead (Gilead, #1))
โ€œ
Women have been driven mad, "gaslighted," for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience. The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have a primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each others' sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other. Women have often felt insane when cleaving to the truth of our experience. Our future depends on the sanity of each of us, and we have a profound stake, beyond the personal, in the project of describing our reality as candidly and fully as we can to each other.
โ€
โ€
Adrienne Rich (On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. Selected Prose 1966-1978)
โ€œ
Can you not see," I said, "that fairy tales in their essence are quite solid and straightforward; but that this everlasting fiction about modern life is in its nature essentially incredible? Folk-lore means that the soul is sane, but that the universe is wild and full of marvels. Realism means that the world is dull and full of routine, but that the soul is sick and screaming. The problem of the fairy tale isโ€”what will a healthy man do with a fantastic world? The problem of the modern novel isโ€”what will a madman do with a dull world? In the fairy tales the cosmos goes mad; but the hero does not go mad. In the modern novels the hero is mad before the book begins, and suffers from the harsh steadiness and cruel sanity of the cosmos.
โ€
โ€
G.K. Chesterton
โ€œ
There is... this rage." she said "This despair and hatred and rage that lives and breathes inside me. There's not sanity to it, no gentleness. It is a monster dwelling under my skin. For the past ten years, I have worked every day, every hour, to keep that monster locked up. And the moment I talk about those two days, and what happened before and after, that monster is going to break loose, and there will be no accounting for what I do." "That is how I was able to stand before the King of Adarlan, how I was able to befriend his son and his captain, how I was able to live in that palace. Because I did not give that rage, those memories, one inch. And right now I am looking for the tools that might destroy my enemy, and I cannot let out the monster, because it will make me use those tools against the king, not put them back as I shouldโ€”and I might very well destroy the world for spite. So that is why I must be Celaena, not Aelinโ€”because being Aelin means facing those things, unleashing that monster. Do you understand?
โ€
โ€
Sarah J. Maas (Heir of Fire (Throne of Glass, #3))
โ€œ
It took me years to learn to sit at my desk for more than two minutes at a time, to put up with the solitude and the terror of failure, and the godawful silence and the white paper. And now that I can take it . . . now that I can finally do it . . . I'm really raring to go. I was in my study writing. I was learning how to go down into myself and salvage bits and pieces of the past. I was learning how to sneak up on the unconscious and how to catch my seemingly random thoughts and fantasies. By closing me out of his world, Bennett had opened all sorts of worlds inside my own head. Gradually I began to realize that none of the subjects I wrote poems about engaged my deepest feelings, that there was a great chasm between what I cared about and what I wrote about. Why? What was I afraid of? Myself, most of all, it seemed. "Freedom is an illusion," Bennett would have said and, in a way, I too would have agreed. Sanity, moderation, hard work, stability . . . I believed in them too. But what was that other voice inside of me which kept urging me on toward zipless fucks, and speeding cars and endless wet kisses and guts full of danger? What was that other voice which kept calling me coward! and egging me on to burn my bridges, to swallow the poison in one gulp instead of drop by drop, to go down into the bottom of my fear and see if I could pull myself up? Was it a voice? Or was it a thump? Something even more primitive than speech. A kind of pounding in my gut which I had nicknamed my "hunger-thump." It was as if my stomach thought of itself as a heart. And no matter how I filled itโ€”with men, with books, with foodโ€”it refused to be still. Unfillableโ€”that's what I was. Nymphomania of the brain. Starvation of the heart.
โ€
โ€
Erica Jong (Fear of Flying)
โ€œ
My name is Kvothe, pronounced nearly the same as "quothe." Names are important as they tell you a great deal about a person. I've had more names than anyone has a right to. The Adem call me Maedre. Which, depending on how it's spoken, can mean The Flame, The Thunder, or The Broken Tree. "The Flame" is obvious if you've ever seen me. I have red hair, bright. If I had been born a couple of hundred years ago I would probably have been burned as a demon. I keep it short but it's unruly. When left to its own devices, it sticks up and makes me look as if I have been set afire. "The Thunder" I attribute to a strong baritone and a great deal of stage training at an early age. I've never thought of "The Broken Tree" as very significant. Although in retrospect, I suppose it could be considered at least partially prophetic. My first mentor called me E'lir because I was clever and I knew it. My first real lover called me Dulator because she liked the sound of it. I have been called Shadicar, Lightfinger, and Six-String. I have been called Kvothe the Bloodless, Kvothe the Arcane, and Kvothe Kingkiller. I have earned those names. Bought and paid for them. But I was brought up as Kvothe. My father once told me it meant "to know." I have, of course, been called many other things. Most of them uncouth, although very few were unearned. I have stolen princesses back from sleeping barrow kings. I burned down the town of Trebon. I have spent the night with Felurian and left with both my sanity and my life. I was expelled from the University at a younger age than most people are allowed in. I tread paths by moonlight that others fear to speak of during day. I have talked to Gods, loved women, and written songs that make the minstrels weep. You may have heard of me.
โ€
โ€
Patrick Rothfuss (The Name of the Wind (The Kingkiller Chronicle, #1))
โ€œ
Want your boat, Georgie?' Pennywise asked. 'I only repeat myself because you really do not seem that eager.' He held it up, smiling. He was wearing a baggy silk suit with great big orange buttons. A bright tie, electric-blue, flopped down his front, and on his hands were big white gloves, like the kind Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck always wore. Yes, sure,' George said, looking into the stormdrain. And a balloon? Iโ€™ve got red and green and yellow and blue...' Do they float?' Float?' The clownโ€™s grin widened. 'Oh yes, indeed they do. They float! And thereโ€™s cotton candy...' George reached. The clown seized his arm. And George saw the clownโ€™s face change. What he saw then was terrible enough to make his worst imaginings of the thing in the cellar look like sweet dreams; what he saw destroyed his sanity in one clawing stroke. They float,' the thing in the drain crooned in a clotted, chuckling voice. It held Georgeโ€™s arm in its thick and wormy grip, it pulled George toward that terrible darkness where the water rushed and roared and bellowed as it bore its cargo of storm debris toward the sea. George craned his neck away from that final blackness and began to scream into the rain, to scream mindlessly into the white autumn sky which curved above Derry on that day in the fall of 1957. His screams were shrill and piercing, and all up and down Witcham Street people came to their windows or bolted out onto their porches. They float,' it growled, 'they float, Georgie, and when youโ€™re down here with me, youโ€™ll float, tooโ€“' George's shoulder socked against the cement of the curb and Dave Gardener, who had stayed home from his job at The Shoeboat that day because of the flood, saw only a small boy in a yellow rain-slicker, a small boy who was screaming and writhing in the gutter with muddy water surfing over his face and making his screams sound bubbly. Everything down here floats,' that chuckling, rotten voice whispered, and suddenly there was a ripping noise and a flaring sheet of agony, and George Denbrough knew no more. Dave Gardener was the first to get there, and although he arrived only forty-five seconds after the first scream, George Denbrough was already dead. Gardener grabbed him by the back of the slicker, pulled him into the street...and began to scream himself as George's body turned over in his hands. The left side of Georgeโ€™s slicker was now bright red. Blood flowed into the stormdrain from the tattered hole where his left arm had been. A knob of bone, horribly bright, peeked through the torn cloth. The boyโ€™s eyes stared up into the white sky, and as Dave staggered away toward the others already running pell-mell down the street, they began to fill with rain.
โ€
โ€
Stephen King (It)