Patricia Highsmith: Notebooks: 10/29/1949

On the insane: they are only trying to find a reality. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to find a reality in existence. The greatest philosophers have never found a satisfactory reality, or its explanation. Going under gas, for instance, the world is quite different, more overwhelmingly convincing than the so-called normal world, as to its reality. There is really no reality, perhaps, only writing a system of expedient behavior, action and reaction, by which people have come to live. That is, most people, who live like this for the same reason most peas fall into the center compartment when dropped from a central point above.