i am perhaps not particularly human, but who cares?

"I am perhaps not particularly human, but who cares?"
— Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

"For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments; and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments."
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

"Repentance? why, it might take me years
before I won through! My life would be empty."
— Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt

"oh Mr. Devil how can you tell you can not tell anything and I I who know everything I keep on having so much light that light is not bright and what after all is the use of light, you can see just as well without it […] and I I wanted to make it and the devil take it yes you devil you do not even want it and I sold my soul to make it. I have made it but have I a soul to pay for it"
— Gertrude Stein, Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights

"And God comes down from the ceiling, bites the ears of everyone awaiting rapture, says, I can’t see you. Set yourself on fire."
— Traci Brimhall

"There is no madness but that which is in every man, since it is man who constitutes madness in the attachment he bears for himself and be the illusions he entertains. […] [I]t is because man is attached to himself that he accepts error as truth, lies as reality, violence and ugliness as beauty and justice."
— Michael Foucault, Madness and Civilization

"Purify [the Heart]; and the many shapes of evil that haunt the outward, and which now seem almost our only realities, will turn to shadowy phantoms, and vanish of their own accord. But, if we go no deeper than the Intellect, and strive, with merely that feeble instrument, to discern and rectify what is wrong, our whole accomplishment will be a dream."
— Nathaniel Hawthorne, 'Earth's Holocaust'

"So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God."
— Herman Melville, Moby Dick

"The man is clear in his mind, but his soul is mad."
— Apocalypse Now

"Starkly I returned
To stare upon the ash of all I burned."
— Wilfred Owen, 'To Eros'