Pat Conroy Quotes

There's a scene in 'Medium Cool' in which a young man walks by with a sign that says, 'Sanity, please.' If anything summarizes what I was feeling at that time, it is that sign.

Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.

I'm easily destroyed and I operate on emotional levels.

It's true that Blake was emotionally disturbed - always has been - but he doesn't have murder in his heart. If he was going to do any damage to anything or anyone, it would be to himself.

I'm very emotional; I think I may go mad in several years' time.

Awash in a flood of hostility and despair, they battled and railed and shattered their bodies on one another, unable to find one strand, one sobering swallow of solace.

I shouldn't precisely have chosen madness if there had been any choice, but once such a thing has taken hold of you, you can't very well get out of it.

I'm a Crank. I'm slowly going crazy. I keep wanting to chew off my own fingers and randomly kill people.

We swung between madness and suicide ... it was beautiful!

If you could count the skeletons in my closet, under my bed and up under my faucet, then you would know I've completely lost it. Is he nuts? No he's insane!

The thought of killing myself had slowed me down to five miles per hour. The thought of killing someone else stopped me completely.

Sanity brings pain but madness is a vile thing.

Once a restless or frayed mood has turned to anger, or violence, or psychosis, Richard, like most, finds it very difficult to see it as illness, rather than being willful, angry, irrational or simply tiresome.

He wanted to hit something or someone. He wanted to burn up the whole world, heal it, and burn it down again.

The most pitiful human ailment is a birdseed heart.

Nothing comes from violence and nothing ever could, for all those born beneath an angry star, lest we forget how fragile we are.

They tried to get me-I got them first! (suicide note)

I have a plan-to go mad.

If she was broken, she would slash him with her jagged edges, reckless as a drunkard with a shattered bottle.

Mental wounds not healing, who and what's to blame. I'm going off the rails on a crazy train.

People who are extremely inside their head, like he was, are caught in a neurosis that goes round and round. Then something will hook them and take them to their end and they can't control it.

Anybody who's been through a divorce will tell you that at one point. they've thought murder. The line between thinking murder and doing murder isn't that major.

Psychoanalytic investigation has shown that in mental patients excessive affection often turns to violent hostility.

I realize that I live on the bubble of insanity. I feel the weight of human suffering, loneliness and despair on me all the time. It's not getting easier; if anything, it's always right on the edge of my skin.

I don't like to be crazy on different levels all of the time.