Top 97 Susanna Kaysen Quotes
#1. The world didn't stop because we weren't in it anymore.
Susanna Kaysen
#2. Tell me that you don't take that blade and drag it across your skin and pray for the courage to press down.
Susanna Kaysen
#3. It was my misfortune-or salvation-to be at all times perfectly conscious of my misperceptions of reality.
Susanna Kaysen
#4. Asa had a sharp understanding of the future
that is, a time when this would be past. Time was rushing through and around him, he almost heard it whistling, and this awareness rounded the world somehow and made it sweet.
Susanna Kaysen
#5. Boyfriends and literature: How can you make a life out of those two things? As it turns out, I did; more literature than boyfriends lately, but I guess you can't have everything.
Susanna Kaysen
#6. As far as I could see, life demanded skills I didn't have.
Susanna Kaysen
#7. And this was the main precondition, that anything might be something else. Once I'd accepted that, it followed that I might be mad, or that someone might think me mad. How could I say for certain that I wasn't, if I couldn't say for certain that a curtain wasn't a mountain range?
Susanna Kaysen
#8. I can honestly say that my misery had been transformed into common unhappiness, so by Freud's definition I have achieved mental health.
Susanna Kaysen
#9. But the fact that I couldn't hold my job was worrisome. I was probably crazy. I'd been skirting the idea of craziness for a year or two, now I was closing in on it.
Pull yourself together! I told myself. Stop indulging yourself. There's nothing wrong with you. You're just wayward.
Susanna Kaysen
#10. Like putting a gun in your mouth. But you put it there, you taste it, it's cold and greasy, your finger is on the trigger, and you find that a whole world lies between this moment and the moment you've been planning, when you'll pull the trigger. That world defeats you.
Susanna Kaysen
#11. What is it about meter and cadence and rhythm that makes their makers mad?
Susanna Kaysen
#12. Scar tissue has no character. It's not like skin. It doesn't show age or illness or pallor or tan. It has no pores, no hair, no wrinkles. It's like a slip cover. It shields and disguises what's beneath. That's why we grow it; we have something to hide.
Susanna Kaysen
#13. What does the sign say?" " 'If you lived here, you'd be home now.' " She clenched her hands with excitement. "See, every day people will drive past and read that sign and think, 'Yeah, if I lived here I'd be home now,' and I will be home. Motherfuckers.
Susanna Kaysen
#16. You have to have a somewhat cold heart to be a writer.
Susanna Kaysen
#17. I'm Ambivalent. In fact that's my new favorite word.
Do you know what it means ?
I don't care.
Susanna Kaysen
#18. The girl at her music sits in another sort of light,the fitful,overcast light of lie,by which we see ourselves and others only imprefectly, and seldom..-Girl,Interrupted
Susanna Kaysen
#19. One of the great pleasures of mental health (whatever that is) is how much less time I have to spend thinking about myself.
Susanna Kaysen
#21. Our hospital was famous and housed many great poets and singers. Did the hospital specialize in poets and singers or was it that poets and singers specialized in madness?
Susanna Kaysen
#22. Insanity comes in two basic varieties: slow and fast.
Susanna Kaysen
#23. Recovered. Had my personality crossed over that border, whatever and wherever it was, to resume life within the confines of normal? Had I stopped arguing with my personality and learned to straddle the line between sane and insane?
Susanna Kaysen
#25. Something about the goat dancing made me want to cry.
Susanna Kaysen
#26. I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't.
Susanna Kaysen
#27. One of my teachers told me I was a nihilist. He meant it as an insult but I took it as a compliment.
Susanna Kaysen
#28. Mental illness seems to be a communication problem between interpreters one and two.
Susanna Kaysen
#29. It's a mean world," she'd say. She was usually glad enough to be back. "There's nobody to take care of you out there.
Susanna Kaysen
#30. Have you ever confused a dream with life? Or stolen something when you have the cash? Have you ever been blue? Or thought your train moving while sitting still? Maybe I was just crazy. Maybe it was the 60's. Or maybe I was just a girl ... interrupted.
Susanna Kaysen
#31. When you're sad you need to hear your sorrow structured into sound.
Susanna Kaysen
#32. The only way to stay sane is to go a little crazy.
Susanna Kaysen
#33. I don't have a whole bunch of literary connections. I don't write reviews or attend writer's conferences. I'm kind of shy and don't want to go to a party. I just want to stay home and read my murder mysteries and try to write and cook dinner.
Susanna Kaysen
#34. My chronic feelings of emptiness and boredom came from the fact that I was living a life based on my incapacities, which were numerous.
Susanna Kaysen
#35. Are you crazy? It's a common phrase, I know. But it means something particular to me: the tunnels, the security screens, the plastic forks, the shimmering, ever-shifting borderline that like all boundaries beckons and asks to be crossed. I do not want to cross it again.
Susanna Kaysen
#36. Disease [is] as one of our languages. Doctors understand what disease has to say about itself. It's up to the person with the disease to understand what the disease has to say to her.
Susanna Kaysen
#37. I know what it's like to want to die. How it hurts to smile. How you try to fit in but you can't. How you hurt yourself on the outside to try to kill the thing on the inside.
Susanna Kaysen
#38. Was everybody seeing this stuff and acting as though they weren't? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act? If some people didn't see these things, what was the matter with them? Were they blind or something?
Susanna Kaysen
#39. You could also "request" to be locked into the seclusion room. Not many people made that request. You had to "request" to get out too. A nurse would look through the chicken wire and decide if you were ready to come out. Somewhat like looking at a cake through the glass of the oven door.
Susanna Kaysen
#40. It's one of the reasons I became a writer, to be able to smoke in peace.
Susanna Kaysen
#41. But when they were done, I wondered if there would be a next time. I felt good. I wasn't dead, yet something was dead. Perhaps I'd managed my peculiar objective of partial suicide. I was lighter, airier than I'd been in years.
Susanna Kaysen
#42. How the fuck else am I going to get any attention in this place?
Lisa always called the hospital 'this place.
Susanna Kaysen
#44. Every window in Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.
Susanna Kaysen
#45. Was I ever crazy? Maybe. Or maybe life is ... Crazy isn't being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It's you or me amplified. If you ever told a lie and enjoyed it. If you ever wished you could be a child forever. They were not perfect, but they were my friends.
Susanna Kaysen
#46. When I was supposed to be awake, I was asleep. When I was supposed to sleep, I was silent. When a pleasure offered itself to me, I avoided it.
Susanna Kaysen
#47. The group had an atomic structure: a nucleus of nuts surrounded by darting, nervous nurse-electrons charged with our protection.
Susanna Kaysen
#48. Being crasy doesn't mean to be broken ... It is you and me amplified, Girl, Interrupted
Susanna Kaysen
#49. It's a long way from not having enough serotonin to thinking the world is "stale, flat and unprofitable"; even further to writing a play about a man driven by that thought.
Susanna Kaysen
#51. Viscosity and velocity are opposites, yet they can look the same. Viscosity causes the stillness of
disinclination, velocity causes the stillness of fascination. An observer can't tell if a person is silent and
still because inner life has stalled or because inner life is transfixingly busy.
Susanna Kaysen
#52. We might get out sometime, but she was locked up forever in that body.
Susanna Kaysen
#53. Maybe, there's a moment growing up when something peels back ... Maybe, maybe, we look for secrets because we can't believe our mind.
Susanna Kaysen
#54. If I could have any job in the world I'd be a professional Cinderella.
Susanna Kaysen
#55. I had an inspiration once. I woke up one morning and I knew that it was my task to swallow fifty asprin.It was my task:my job for the day.-17 Girl Interrupted
Susanna Kaysen
#56. It's a fairly accurate portrait of me at eighteen, minus a few quirks like reckless driving and eating binges. It's accurate but it isn't profound.
Susanna Kaysen
#57. By the time we hit the streets they were silent and closed in on us, and they had assumed the Nonchalant Look, an expression that said, I am not a nurse escorting six lunatics to the ice cream parlor. But they were, and we were their six lunatics, so we behaved like lunatics.
Susanna Kaysen
#58. Now I was safe, now I was really crazy, and nobody could take me out of there.
Susanna Kaysen
#59. Translation: I need to know the particulars of craziness so I can assure myself that I'm not crazy.
Susanna Kaysen
#60. People ask, How did you get in there? What they really want to know is if they are likely to end up in there as well. I can't answer the real question. All I can tell them is, It's easy.
Susanna Kaysen
#61. This was what was wonderful, standing alone in the big, soft night rewriting the past to make myself miss what had never been. Now that it was over, I could turn the past into anything I wanted.
Susanna Kaysen
#62. I wanted to get rid of a certain aspect of my character. I was performing a kind of self-abortion with those aspirin. It worked for a while. Then it stopped; but I had no heart to try again.
Susanna Kaysen
#63. It was a spring day, the sort that gives people hope: all soft winds and delicate smells of
warm earth. Suicide weather.
Susanna Kaysen
#64. Once you start parsing a face, it's a peculiar item: squishy, pointy, with lots of air vents and wet spots.
Susanna Kaysen
#65. There is thought, and then there is thinking about thoughts, and they don't feel the same. They must reflect quite different aspects of brain function. The point is, the brain talks to itself, and by talking to itself changes its perceptions.
Susanna Kaysen
#66. Maybe I was just flirting with madness the way I flirted with my teachers and my classmates.
Susanna Kaysen
#67. She rushed out, because the darkness in the theater was too much when combined with the darkness in her head .
Susanna Kaysen
#68. Emptiness and boredom: what a complete understatement. What I felt was complete desolation. Desolation, despair and boredom.
Susanna Kaysen
#69. I'm your mind", it claims. "You can't parse ME into dendrites and synapses
Susanna Kaysen
#70. My family had a lot of characteristics - achievements, ambitions, talents, expectations - that all seemed to be recessive in me.
Susanna Kaysen
#71. And in the end, I lost him. I did it on purpose, the way Garance lost
Baptiste in the crowd. I needed to be alone, I felt. I wanted to be going on alone to my future.
Susanna Kaysen
#72. I would if somebody would want to but of course nobody would want to so I wouldn't want to force anybody to want to.
Susanna Kaysen
#73. I wasn't convinced I was crazy, though I feared I was. Some people say that having any conscious opinion on the matter is a mark of sanity, but I'm not sure that's true. I still think about it. I'll always have to think about it.
Susanna Kaysen
#74. Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone.
Susanna Kaysen
#75. The question was, What could we do?
Could we get up every morning and take showers and put on clothes and go to work? Could we think straight? Could we not say crazy things when they occurred to us?
Some of us could; some of us couldn't. In the world's terms, though, all of us were tainted.
Susanna Kaysen
#76. Crazy isn't being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It's you or me amplified. If you ever told a lie and enjoyed it. If you ever wished you could be a child forever.
Susanna Kaysen
#77. I noticed that some of my deadness was being replaced by an intense feeling about the Greek stories and the Bible stories. They were similar. There was something naked about these stories. Terrible things happened, and then some more terrible things.
Susanna Kaysen
#78. Thus, our keepers. As for finders - well, we had to be our own finders.
Susanna Kaysen
#79. I am not a nurse escorting six lunatics to the ice cream parlor.
Susanna Kaysen
#80. Whatever we call it - mind, character, soul - we like to think we possess something that is greater than the sum of our neurons that 'animates' us.
Susanna Kaysen
#81. That's because the analysts are writing about a country they call Mind and the neuroscientists are reporting from a country they call Brain.
Susanna Kaysen
#82. This behavior may ... counteract feelings of'numbness'and depersonalization that aries duriing periods of extreme stress.-153 Girl,Interrupted
Susanna Kaysen
#84. And it is easy to slip into a parallel universe. There are so many of them: worlds of the insane, the criminal, the crippled, the dying, perhaps of the dead as well. These worlds exist alongside this world and resemble it, but are not in it.
Susanna Kaysen
#85. Their love story unfolded and then folded up again in Cambridge, as I watched and took mental notes and learned nothing, naturally, because the heart is unteachable.
Susanna Kaysen
#86. The meat was bruised, bleeding, and imprisoned in a tight wrapping. And, though I had a six-month respite from thinking about it, so was I.
Susanna Kaysen
#87. I told her once I wasn't good at anything. She told me survival is a talent.
Susanna Kaysen
#88. Actually, it was only part of myself I wanted to kill: the part that wanted to kill herself, that dragged me into the suicide debate and made every window, kitchen implement, and subway station a rehearsal for tragedy.
Susanna Kaysen
#89. Not everything has a happy ending, and not everything has an ending. Some things just kind of dribble away or cut off abruptly.
Susanna Kaysen
#90. They were all seventeen and miserable, just like me. They didn't have time to wonder why I was a little more miserable than most.
Susanna Kaysen
#91. What does borderline personality mean, anyhow? It appears to be a way station between neurosis and psychosis: a fractured but not disassembled psyche. Though to quote my post-Melvin psychiatrist: "It's what they call people whose lifestyles bother them.
Susanna Kaysen
#92. Imagined my character as a plate or shirt that had been manufactured incorrectly and was therefore useless.
Susanna Kaysen
#93. We say that Columbus discovered America and Newton discovered gravity, as though America and gravity weren't there until Columbus and Newton got wind of them.
Susanna Kaysen
#94. In a strange way we were free. We'd reached the end of the line. We had nothing more to lose. Our privacy, our liberty, our dignity: all of this was gone and we were stripped down to the bare bones of our selves
Susanna Kaysen
#96. My father was judgmental and kind of mean, and I'm like that. And he was very perfectionistic, and I'm like that. And he was very hard on himself, and I'm like that.
Susanna Kaysen
#97. Something had been peeled back, a covering or shell that works to protect us. I couldn't decide whether the covering was something on me or something attached to every thing in the world. It didn't matter, really; wherever it had been, it wasn't there anymore.
Susanna Kaysen
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