Maybe he was crazy, he thought. It would explain everything. Insanity was good that way.

If he were insane, however, his was a very cool and collected insanity.

By this time I was in a state of excitement bordering on insanity; but I also had the cunning of the insane.

It became obvious, now that we had time to concentrate, that Captain Creech was extremely drunk.

Yes, he realized, if a man began to think of himself as divinely appointed, he was close to thinking of himself as God—and at that point lay insanity.

Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.

The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.

He certainly didn’t feel insane, he reflected—but then did any lunatic, ever?

I'm going to end a life that I thought could contain every kind of greatness but that in fact consisted only of my incapacity to really want to be great. Whenever I arrived at a certainty, I remembered that those with the greatest certainties are lunatics.

The sergeant was braver than most, and stupider—the two qualities often going hand in hand.

If he was indeed mad, his delusions were beautifully organized.

Prior to studies of unusually intelligent people that showed them to be generally much better adapted and happier than others, the popular belief in the United States was that exceptional intelligence was often associated with exceptional ability to “drive yourself nuts.” Hence, people believed that genius and lunacy were intimately connected. Perhaps, nearly all of us “drive ourselves a little nuts” by virtue of creating stories that lead us to the illusion that we understand history, other people, causality, and life—when we don’t.

It wasn't to be endured! For half an hour, the Captain shot off salvo after salvo of the very worst sort of profanity. He started with the sun and ran down the list of planets, satellites, asteroids, comets, to the very meteors themselves. He was starting on the nearer fixed stars, when he collapsed from sheer nervous exhaustion. He was so excited that he never thought to ask us what we were doing in the storeroom in the first place, and for that Whitefield and I were duly grateful.

But Captain Bartlett is no fool. Having purged his system of its nervous tension, he saw clearly that that which cannot be cured must be endured.

—What was I thinking earlier about lunatics making their own version of truth? Why specify lunatics?