A new weekly series that explores a featured theme—this month, it's "Headcases"—by pairing timeless quotations with urgent images. Read on, spot the connections (some are more hidden than others), and by all means quote your favorite headcase in the comments.

​“Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.”

-Freud

“My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery—always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?”

-Virginia Woolf

“If a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if he has lost a self—himself—he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it.”

-Oliver Sacks

​“I have known a lot of people to go down and out—they kill themselves with alcohol or downers. But I've never known anybody to go up and out.”

-Ken Kesey

​“If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.”

-Picasso

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Images

1. Lindsay Morris, from the NYTimes article "What’s So Bad About a Boy Who Wants to Wear a Dress?"

2. John Marshall Mantel, from the NYTimes article "For Jennifer Sultan, a Dot-Com Bust"

3. Marc Steiner, from the NYTimes article "Police Sought Cellphones for Video of Times Square Shooting"

4. blogs.amctv.com

5. NASA TV (via Reuters), from the NYTimes Lede blog "NASA’s Curiosity Rover Successfully Lands on Mars"

Quote-wrangler: Todd Ferguson