“With the truth so dull and depressing, the only working alternative is wild bursts of madness and filigree.”

“Madness is too glamorous a term to convey what happens to most people who are losing their minds. That word is too exciting, too literary, too interesting in its connotations, to convey the boredom, the slowness, the dreariness, the dampness of depression…depression is pure dullness, tedium straight up. Depression is, especially these days, an overused term to be sure, but never one associated with anything wild, anything about dancing all night with a lampshade on your head and then going home and killing yourself…The word madness allows its users to celebrate the pain of its sufferers, to forget that underneath all the acting-out and quests for fabulousness and fine poetry, there is a person in huge amounts of dull, ugly agony...Remember that when you’re at the point at which you’re doing something as desperate and violent as sticking your head in an oven, it is only because the life that preceded this act felt even worse. Think about living in depression from moment to moment, and know it is not worth any of the great art that comes as its by-product.”

“I am madness maddened! That wild madness that's only calm to comprehend itself”

“Desert this mad and unfounded obsession with the so-called truth. In pursuit of truth, you are guaranteed a long and perilous run through a semantic maze that derives meaning only from your undivided attention.”

“so who's more adult- somebody who works like mad to avoid a problem or somebody who works like mad to solve it?”

“Depression is not madness, it's just depression, the loser version, the low-energy response to bad stuff that happens in your life. When you're depressed, you think you're the only one to have ever tasted this kind of hurt. And that lonely self-regard brings with it its own painful pleasure.”