Lunatic Quotes - page 2
I clearly see you a tapeworm, but not a cobra, not a cobra at all...no good at the flute! (...) I'll go applaud you when you finally become a true monster, when you'll have paid them, the witches, what you have to, their price, so they transmute you, blossom you, into a true phenomenon. Into a tapeworm that plays the flute. (To the Fidgeting Lunatic)
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
The custom official was desperate, he did not know whether they were pictures, wood ware or even arms [about his abstract collage art, Schwitters exported to France in 1939]. I got the impression he had an inner struggle with two options, either to have me arrested or to call the lunatic asylum. Finally he did not want to make a fool of himself, and accepted they were paintings, especially because another customs official knew me personally and confirmed that I was an artist.
Kurt Schwitters
All primitive people thought that a lunatic was possessed by a spirit. When his incoherent words more or less accord with the moral prejudices of the time, the spirit is a good one, and the man i s a saint. In the opposite case, the spirit is evil and the man must be suppressed. It is just according to the time and place and the doctors, whether a prophetess would be worshipped as a priestess or ducked as a witch. Innumerable violent lunatics have escaped the cells, thanks to the War, and their very violence has made heroes of them. And in every Parliament there are at least five or six undisputed idiots who got elected for their madness through the admiration of their constituents.
André Maurois
