Madness might sometimes give ...

Madness might sometimes give access to a kind of knowledge. But was not a guarantee.
 Shirley Hazzard

Quotes from the same author

Marriage is like democracy - it doesn't really work, but it's all we've been able to come up with.
 Shirley Hazzard
Sometimes, surely, truth is closer to imagination or to intelligence, to love than to fact? To be accurate is not to be right.
 Shirley Hazzard
I have a superstition that if I talk about plot, it's like letting sand out of a hole in the bottom of a bag.
 Shirley Hazzard
In the circle where I was raised, I knew of no one knowledgeable in the visual arts, no one who regularly attended musical performances, and only two adults other than my teachers who spoke without embarrassment of poetry and literature — both of these being women. As far as I can recall, I never heard a man refer to a good or a great book. I knew no one who had mastered, or even studied, another language from choice. And our articulate, conscious life proceeded without acknowledgement of the preceding civilisations which had produced it.
 Shirley Hazzard