The uncertainty wore on him. The conditions in jail--the handcuffs, the noise, the filth, the crowding--mangled his senses. It's likely that, if one must be incarcerated in the United States, a jail in central Maine would be among the more tolerable spots, but to Knight it was torture. "Bedlam" is how he referred to the place. It never got dark in jail; at eleven p.m., the lights merely became a little duller. "I suspect, " he noted, "more damage has been done to my sanity in jail, in months; than years, decades, in the woods. Michael Finkel
The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.
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Marcus Aurelius
The true definition of mental illness is when the majority of your time is spent in the past or future, but rarely living in the realism of NOW.
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Shannon L. Alder
Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. Good mental machinery ought to break its own wheels and levers, if anything is thrust among them suddenly which tends to stop them or reverse their motion. A weak mind does not accumulate force enough...
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Unknown
Too much sanity may be madness – and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!
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Dale Wasserman
He pilfered a copy of Ulysses, but it was possibly the one book he did not finish. 'What's the point of it? I suspect it was a bit of a joke by Joyce. He just kept his mouth shut as people read into it more...
Knight's disdain for Thoreau was bottomless - 'he had no deep insight into nature'...
The only book Knight didn't steal was the one he most often saw. 'I had no need for a Bible, ' he said.
With his release imminent, Knight seems more unsettled than ever. He scratches furiously at his knees. Jail, he's realized, might not be all bad. There's routine and order in jail, and he's able to click into a survival mode that is not too dissimilar, in...
