Susanna Kaysen Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Susanna Kaysen.
Famous Quotes By Susanna Kaysen
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
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
This time I read the title of the painting: Girl Interrupted at Her Music. Interrupted at her music: as my life had been, interrupted in the music of being seventeen, as her life had been, snatched and fixed on canvas: one moment made to stand still and to stand for all the other moments, whatever they would be or might have been. What life can recover from that? — Susanna Kaysen
The floor of ice cream parlor bothered me. It was black-and-white checkboard tile, bigger than supermarket checkboard. If I looked only at a white square, I would be all right, but it was hard to ignore the black squares that surrounded the white ones. The contrast got under my skin. The floor meant yes, no, this, that, up, down, day, night -all the indecisions and opposites that were bad enough in life without having them spelled out for you on the floor. — Susanna Kaysen
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
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
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
Being crasy doesn't mean to be broken ... It is you and me amplified, Girl, Interrupted — Susanna Kaysen
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
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
Imagined my character as a plate or shirt that had been manufactured incorrectly and was therefore useless. — Susanna Kaysen
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
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
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
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
Twenty aspirin, a little slit alongside the veins of the arm, maybe even a bad half hour standing on a roof: We've all had those. And somewhat more dangerous things, 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. You put the gun back in the drawer. You'll have to find another way. — Susanna Kaysen
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
You can see why doubting one's own craziness is
considered a good sign: It's a sort of flailing response by
the second interpreter. What's happening? the second
interpreter is saying. He tells me it's a tiger but I'm not
convinced; maybe there's something wrong with me.
Enough doubt is in there to give "reality" a toehold. — Susanna Kaysen
But something about the static truth of numbers hurt my brain. Numbers felt sharp. Words felt elastic and springy. Language had an unpredictable, quicksilver quality, saying one thing but meaning something else, varying from place to place but maintaining (against all evidence) that it was the same language. Thinking about words was ticklish and amusing. It was also easy, as if they fit into slots and patterns prepared for them in my mind. Numbers on the other hand, bounced right out of my mind. — Susanna Kaysen
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
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
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
I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't. — Susanna Kaysen
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
I'm Ambivalent. In fact that's my new favorite word.
Do you know what it means ?
I don't care. — Susanna Kaysen
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
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
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
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
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
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
The world didn't stop because we weren't in it anymore. — Susanna Kaysen
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
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
Thus, our keepers. As for finders - well, we had to be our own finders. — Susanna Kaysen
How the fuck else am I going to get any attention in this place?
Lisa always called the hospital 'this place. — Susanna Kaysen
If I could have any job in the world I'd be a professional Cinderella. — Susanna Kaysen
For many of us, the hospital was as much a refuge as it was a prison. Though we were cut off from the world and all the trouble we enjoyed stirring up out there, we were also cut off from the demands and expectations that had driven us crazy. What could be expected of us now that we were stowed away in a loony bin? — Susanna Kaysen
It was a spring day, the sort that gives people hope: all soft winds and delicate smells of
warm earth. Suicide weather. — Susanna Kaysen
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
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
With wild eyes that had seen freedom. — Susanna Kaysen
Don't ask me those questions! Don't ask me what life means or how we know reality or why we have to suffer so much. Don't talk about how nothing feels real, how everything is coated with gelatin and shining like oil in the sun. I don't want to hear about the tiger in the corner or the Angel of Death or the phone calls from John the Baptist. — Susanna Kaysen
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
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
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
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
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
All my integrity seemed to lie in saying No. — Susanna Kaysen
Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act? — Susanna Kaysen
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
Once you start parsing a face, it's a peculiar item: squishy, pointy, with lots of air vents and wet spots. — Susanna Kaysen
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
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
You have to have a somewhat cold heart to be a writer. — Susanna Kaysen
Confuse was the nurses' word for abuse. — Susanna Kaysen
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
This behavior may ... counteract feelings of'numbness'and depersonalization that aries duriing periods of extreme stress.-153 Girl,Interrupted — Susanna Kaysen
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
What is it about meter and cadence and rhythm that makes their makers mad? — Susanna Kaysen
I told her once I wasn't good at anything. She told me survival is a talent. — Susanna Kaysen
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
I was trying to explain my situation to myself. My situation was that I was in pain and nobody knew it, even I had trouble knowing it. So I told myself, over and over, You are in pain. It was the only way I could get through to myself. I was demonstrating externally and irrefutably an inward condition. — Susanna Kaysen
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
The group had an atomic structure: a nucleus of nuts surrounded by darting, nervous nurse-electrons charged with our protection. — Susanna Kaysen
In the parallel universe the laws of physics are suspended.
What goes up does not necessarily come down, a body at rest does not tend to stay at
rest and not every action can be counted on to provoke an equal and opposite reaction.
Time, 'too, is different. It may run in circles, flow backward, skip about from now to
then. The very arrangement of molecules is fluid: Tables can be clocks, faces,
flowers. — Susanna Kaysen
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
Freedom was the price of privacy. — Susanna Kaysen
She wasn't blotto, she was plotting. — Susanna Kaysen
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
Now I was safe, now I was really crazy, and nobody could take me out of there. — Susanna Kaysen
Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone. — Susanna Kaysen
Emptiness and boredom: what a complete understatement. What I felt was complete desolation. Desolation, despair and boredom. — Susanna Kaysen
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
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
Lunatics are similar to designated hitters. Often an entire family is crazy, but since an entire family can't go into the hospital, one person is designated as crazy and goes inside. Then, depending on how the rest of the family is feeling that person is kept inside or snatched out, to prove something about the family's mental health. — Susanna Kaysen
It's one of the reasons I became a writer, to be able to smoke in peace. — Susanna Kaysen
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
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
Emptiness and boredom: what an understatement. What I felt was complete desolation. Desolation, despair, and depression.
Isn't there some other way to look at this? After all, angst of these dimensions is a luxury item. You need to be well fed, clothes, and housed to have time for this much self-pity. — Susanna Kaysen
Reality was getting too dense. — Susanna Kaysen
Maybe I was just flirting with madness the way I flirted with my teachers and my classmates. — Susanna Kaysen
When digital watches were invented years later they reminded me of five-minute checks. They murdered time in the same way -slowly- chopping off pieces of it and lobbing them into the dustbin with a little click to let you know time was gone. Click, swish, "Checks," swish, click: another five minutes of life down the drain. And spent in this place. — Susanna Kaysen
We might get out sometime, but she was locked up forever in that body. — Susanna Kaysen
Translation: I need to know the particulars of craziness so I can assure myself that I'm not crazy. — Susanna Kaysen
Kaysen elaborates through parts of the book on her thoughts about how mental illness is treated. She explains that families who are willing to pay the rather high costs of hospitalization do so to prove their own sanity. Once one member of the family is hospitalized, it becomes easier for the rest of the family to distance themselves from the problem and to create a clear boundary between the sane and the insane. Recognizing a family member or friend as insane makes others around them, says Kaysen, compare themselves to that individual. Hospitalization allows for distance from this questioning of self that makes us so uncomfortable. Her view that mental illness often includes the entire family means the hospitalized family member becomes an excuse for other family members not to look at their own problems. This explains the willingness to pay the high financial costs of hospitalization. — Susanna Kaysen
Suicide is a form of murder - premeditated murder. It isn't something you do the first time you think of doing it. It takes getting used to. And you need the means, the opportunity, the motive. A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind. — Susanna Kaysen
How many girls do you think a seventeen-year-old boy would have to screw to earn the label "compulsively promiscuous"? Three? No, not enough. Six? Doubtful. Ten? That sounds more likely. Probably in the fifteen-to-twenty range, would be my guess
if they ever put that label on boys, which I don't recall their doing.
And for seventeen-year-old girls, how many boys? — Susanna Kaysen
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
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
Which is worse, overload or underload? Luckily, I never had to choose. One or Pass on to where? Back into my cells to lurk like a virus waiting for the next opportunity? Out into the ether of the world to wait for the circumstances that would provoke its reappearance? Endogenous or exogenous, nature or nurture - it's the great mystery of mental illness. — Susanna Kaysen
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
I got better and Daisy didn't and I can't explain why. Maybe I was just flirting with madness the way I flirted with my teachers and my classmates. 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. — Susanna Kaysen
Something about the goat dancing made me want to cry. — Susanna Kaysen
The debate was wearing me out. Once you've posed that question, it won't go away. I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't. Anything I thought or did was immediately drawn into the debate. Made a stupid remark - why not kill myself? Missed the bus - better put an end to it all. Even the good got in there. I liked that movie - maybe I shouldn't kill myself. — Susanna Kaysen
It's important to cultivate detachment. One way to do this is to practice imagining yourself dead, or in the process of dying. If there's a window, you must imagine your body falling out of that window. If there's a knife, you must imagine the knife piercing your skin. If there's a train coming, you must imagine your torso flattened under its wheels. These excercises are necessary to achieving the proper distance. — Susanna Kaysen