“He was transfixed at the sight of the lords and ladies of his realm running about like demented chickens.”
― Jonathan Stroud, The Amulet of Samarkand

“Every single person is a fool, insane, a failure, or a bad person to at least ten people.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“We would not be ashamed of doing some of the things we do in private, if the number of sane human beings who do them in public were large enough.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“To evade insanity and depression, we unconsciously limit the number of people toward whom we are sincerely sympathetic.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Maybe he was honor-bound to lock us in, by some imagined duty? Perhaps this was an Islamic preparation to make us contended wives? Were these locks supposed to dampen useless dreams that sparked needless desires? Or, was he a mad man, sick and demented?”
― Michael Benzehabe, Persianality

“I, Larry Vail, do hereby confess
To murdering Merry in her little dress.
To strangling and raping and making a mess.
To all of these charges the answer is yes.”
― Rosalyn Drexler, The Line of Least Existence and Other Plays

“Bless their demented little hearts.”
― Rick Riordan, The Sword of Summer

“You do not realize how much incompetence is in the workplace until you become a supervisor.”
― Steven Magee

“Between the pleasure of a kiss and of what a man and woman do in bed seems to me only a gradation. A kiss, for instance, is not to be minimized, or its value judged by anyone else. I wonder do these men grade their pleasure in terms of whether their actions produce a child or not, and do they consider them more pleasant if they do. It is a question of pleasure after all, and what's the use debating the pleasure of an ice cream cone versus a football gamme--or a Beethoven quartet versus the Mona Lisa. I'll leave that to the philosophers. But their attitude was that I must be somehow demented or blind (plus a kind of regret, I thought, at the fact that a fairly attractive woman is presumably unavailable to men). [...] The most important point I did not mention and was not thought of by anyone--that the rapport between two men or two women can be absolute and perfect, as it can never be between man and woman, and perhaps some people want just this, as others want that more shifting and uncertain thing that happens between men and women. It was said or at least implied yesterday that my present course would bring me to the depths of human vice and degeneration. Yes, I have sunk a good deal since they took you from me. It is true, if I were to go on like this and be spied upon, attacked, never possessing one person long enough so that knowledge of a person is a superficial thing--that is degeneration. Or to live against one's grain, that is degeneration by definition.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt