Cowgirls, Page 172--Voluntary Craziness

"There are two kinds of crazy people..."

Tom's compassion, understanding and acceptance of people who choose to live outside the box is a golden thread running through all of his books. He has a way of not only making quirks tolerable, but preferable to the gray, lemming-like drugery of "normalicy." The effect is twofold--first it educates the "normal" ones, gives them a new way of seeing. and next, it provides great comfort and encouragement to those of us who choose not to fall in line and stay quietly inside our pretty pigeon holes.

This is one of those pages.
"There are two kinds of crazy people...[t]hose whose primitive instincts, sexual and agressive, have been misdirected, blunted, confused or shattered at an early age by environmental and/or biological factors beyond their control. Not many of these people can...regain that balance we call 'sanity.'...But there are other people who choose to be crazy in order to cope with what they regard as a crazy world. They have adopted craziness as a lifestyle...the only way you can get them to give up their craziness is to convince them that the world is actually sane...I have found such a conviction almost impossible to support."