Susanna Kaysen Quotes

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.

The only way to stay sane is to go a little crazy.

Every window in Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.

I am not a nurse escorting six lunatics to the ice cream parlor.

I told her once I wasn’t good at anything. She told me survival is a talent.

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. You hurt yourself on the outside to try to kill the thing on the inside.

My chronic feelings of emptiness and boredom came from the fact that I was living a life based on my incapacities, which were numerous.

Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone.

An observer can't tell if a person is silent and still because inner life has stalled or because inner life is transfixingly busy.

As far as I could see, life demanded skills I didn't have.

A thought is a hard thing to control.

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

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?

This behavior may...counteract feelings of'numbness'and depersonalization that aries duriing periods of extreme stress.-153 Girl,Interrupted

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

I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't.

Mental illness seems to be a communication problem between interpreters one and two.

Not everything has a happy ending, and not everything has an ending. Some things just kind of dribble away or cut off abruptly.

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.

It's one of the reasons I became a writer, to be able to smoke in peace.

When women are angry at men, they call them heartless. When men are angry at women, they call them crazy.

The world didn't stop because we weren't in it anymore.

Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?

My family had a lot of characteristics - achievements, ambitions, talents, expectations - that all seemed to be recessive in me.

A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind.

If I could have any job in the world I'd be a professional Cinderella.

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.

Whatever we call it - mind, character, soul - we like to think we possess something that is greater than the sum of our neurons and that animates us.

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.

Tell me that you don’t take that blade and drag it across your skin and pray for the courage to press down.

Maybe I was just flirting with madness the way I flirted with my teachers and my classmates.

You have to have a somewhat cold heart to be a writer.

There is thought, and then there is thinking about thoughts, and they don't feel the same.

It was my misfortune-or salvation-to be at all times perfectly conscious of my misperceptions of reality.

When you’re sad you need to hear your sorrow structured into sound.

... now I was safe, now I was really crazy, and nobody could take me out of there.

With wild eyes that had seen freedom.

Emptiness and boredom: what a complete understatement. What I felt was complete desolation. Desolation, despair and boredom.

It was a spring day, the sort that gives people hope: all soft winds and delicate smells of warm earth. Suicide weather.

Maybe, there's a moment growing up when something peels back... Maybe, maybe, we look for secrets because we can't believe our minds...

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.

Was everybody seeing this stuff and acting as though they weren't? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?

Freedom was the price of privacy.

All my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.

Something about the goat dancing made me want to cry.

Confuse was the nurses' word for abuse.

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.

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.

Insanity comes in two basic varieties: slow and fast. I'm not talking about onset or duration. I mean the quality of the insanity, the day-to-day business of being nuts.

I'm your mind", it claims. "You can't parse ME into dendrites and synapses