“Nowadays we aren't allowed to use the word mad. What lunacy. The few psychiatrists I respect always talk about people being mad. Use the short, simple, true words. Dead, I say, and dying, and mad, and adultery. I don't say passed on, or slipping away, or terminal (oh, he's terminal? Which one? Euston, St Pancras, the Gare St Lazare?), or personality disorder, or fooling around, bit on the side, well she's away a lot visiting her sister. I say mad and adultery, that's what I say. Mad has the right sound to it. It's an ordinary word, a word which tells us how lunacy might come and call like a delivery van.




Terrible things are also ordinary. Do you know what Nabokov said about adultery in his lecture on Madame Bovary? He said it was 'a most conventional way to rise above the conventional'.”






Julian Barnes. Flaubert's Parrot.