“Perhaps I am too tame, too domestic a magician. But how does one work up a little madness? I meet with mad people every day in the street, but I never thought before to wonder how they got mad. Perhaps I should go wandering on lonely moors and barren shores. That is always a popular place for lunatics - in novels and plays at any rate. Perhaps wild England will make me mad.”

“When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical may be madness. To surrender dreams, this may be madness ...Maddest of all is to see life as it is and not as it should be.”

“I am not mad. I am eccentric perhaps--at least certain people say so; but as regards my profession. I am very much as one says, 'all there.”

“Thy shrunk voice sounds too calmly, sanely woeful to me. In no Paradise myself, I am impatient of all misery in others that is not mad. Thou should’st go mad, blacksmith; say, why dost thou not go mad? How can’st thou endure without being mad? Do the heavens yet hate thee, that thou can’st not go mad?”

“Professors go batty too, perhaps more often than other people, although owing to their profession, their madness is less often remarked. ”

“I am mad at you, Holder,” I say with an unsteady, but sure voice. “But no matter how mad I’ve been, I never for one second stopped wanting you here with me.”