all the tall mad mountains of her mind

Friends disappear
or they are powerless.
This is what misfortune means
an acid test of friendship.
I wouldn't wish it on anyone.

What Norman Bates calls for is for an actor to be able to go into their insanity, ... Vince is one of the few people I think who's willing to go into that duplicity in himself, and that insanity, and say, 'You know what? Now I'll show it to you.' I think that we're going to love his Norman Bates, because he's showing you himself in ways that nobody else would have the courage to do. It's an amazing performance.

Was I insane? Maybe. But then, there were many different kinds of insanity. Aunt Rose had always taken for granted that the whole world was in a state of constantly fluctuating madness, and that a neurosis was not an illness, but a fact of life, like pimples. Some have more, some have less, but only truly abnormal people have none at all. This commonsense philosophy had consoled me many times before, and it did now, too.

Her purse was a weight, ballast; it tethered her to the earth as her mind floated away.

She had learnt a painful lesson, she thought – that as they die, the ones we love, we lose our witnesses, our watchers, those who know and understand the tiny little meaningless patterns, those words drawn in water with a stick. And there is nothing left but the endless flow.