What is it about meter and cadence and rhythm that makes their makers mad?

Was everybody seeing this stuff and acting as though they weren't? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?

Mental illness seems to be a communication problem between interpreters one and two.

The floor of ice cream parlor bothered me. It was black-and-white checkboard tile, bigger than supermarket checkboard. If I looked only at a white square, I would be all right, but it was hard to ignore the black squares that surrounded the white ones. The contrast got under my skin. The floor meant yes, no, this, that, up, down, day, night -all the indecisions and opposites that were bad enough in life without having them spelled out for you on the floor.

... now I was safe, now I was really crazy, and nobody could take me out of there.

All my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.

It was a spring day, the sort that gives people hope: all soft winds and delicate smells of warm earth. Suicide weather.