Herta Muller Quotes

'Insanity... I like it."

I say, Watson,’ he whispered, ‘would you be afraid to sleep in the same room as a lunatic, a man with softening of the brain, an idiot whose mind has lost its grip?’ ‘Not in the least,’ I answered in astonishment. ‘Ah, that’s lucky,’ he said, and not another word would he utter that night.

Plenty of crazy people in New York. There are so many crazy people here, I think it's like one out of every one person is completely out of their mind.

When you are insane, you are busy being insane-all the time ... when I was crazy, that was all I was.

Insanity hovered close at hand, like an eager waiter at an expensive restaurant.

The idea began to sink in, more than it ever had, that I might be crazy, in the traditional sense of the word. That I might be, forever and ever amen, a Crazy Person. That's what we'd suspected all along, what I'd been working so hard to disprove, what might be true. I preferred, by far, being dead.

That's the nice thing about insanity: evil people kill you, but crazy ones try to make you understand.

[defines a madman as] a man who preferred to become mad,in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor.

A crazy person doesn't really lose his mind. It just becomes something more entertaining.

Men are mad most of their lives; few live sane, fewer die so. The acts of people are baffling unless we realize that their wits are disordered. Man is driven to justice by his lunacy.

I doubt if a single individual could be found from the whole of mankind free from some form of insanity. The only difference is one of degree. A man who sees a gourd and takes it for his wife is called insane because this happens to very few people.

In revolutions, especially democratic revolutions, madmen, not those so called by courtesy, but genuine madmen, have played a very considerable political part. One thing is certain, and that is that a condition of semi-madness is not unbecoming at such times, and often even leads to success.

Madness alone is truly terrifying, inasmuch as you cannot placate it by threats, persuasion, or bribes.

Man is the only animal who is prone to insanity.

As for the demented, I hold it certain that all beings deprived of reason are thus afflicted only by the Devil.

Mystical state, madness, how it frightens people. How utterly crazy they become, remote, rude, peculiar, cruel, taunting, farouche as wild beasts who have smelled danger, the unthinkable.

[Madness] is the jail we could all end up in. And we know it. And watch our step. For a lifetime. We behave. A fantastic and entire system of social control, by the threat of example as effective over the general population as detention centers in dictatorships, the image of the madhouse floats through every mind for the course of its lifetime.

Eccentricty had flowered into madness.

All that makes a lunatic are the very ordinary ideas of mankind shut up inside a man's head.

The problem with being nuts, she thought, is that you don't always feel as if you're nuts. Sometimes, in fact, you feel perfectly sane, and there just happens to be a trailer-shaped dragon crouching in the lot next door.

Madness has its own dynamism. It just goes on.

Madness breeds madness.

So this is what insanity is. Not goofy behavior, but watching a sudden change in the world you used to know.

Madness, as I understood it from books, meant a person who was open to the high white whine of everything.

We are all born mad. Some remain so.