Susanna Kaysen Quotes

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.

Confuse was the nurses' word for abuse.

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

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

One of the great pleasures of mental health (whatever that is) is how much less time I have to spend thinking about myself.

Translation: I need to know the particulars of craziness so I can assure myself that I'm not crazy.

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

Freedom was the price of privacy.

Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?

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

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

Thus, our keepers. As for finders - well, we had to be our own finders.

Insanity comes in two basic varieties: slow and fast.

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.

With wild eyes that had seen freedom.

The group had an atomic structure: a nucleus of nuts surrounded by darting, nervous nurse-electrons charged with our protection.

I can honestly say that my misery had been transformed into common unhappiness, so by Freud's definition I have achieved mental health.

Every window in Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.

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

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

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

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

Being crasy doesn't mean to be broken ... It is you and me amplified, Girl, Interrupted

One of my teachers told me I was a nihilist. He meant it as an insult but I took it as a compliment.

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

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

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

Once you start parsing a face, it's a peculiar item: squishy, pointy, with lots of air vents and wet spots.

Something about the goat dancing made me want to cry.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Imagined my character as a plate or shirt that had been manufactured incorrectly and was therefore useless.

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

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

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.

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

She wasn't blotto, she was plotting.

She rushed out, because the darkness in the theater was too much when combined with the darkness in her head .

I'm Ambivalent. In fact that's my new favorite word.
Do you know what it means ?
I don't care.

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

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

All my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.

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

How the fuck else am I going to get any attention in this place?
Lisa always called the hospital 'this place.

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.

That's because the analysts are writing about a country they call Mind and the neuroscientists are reporting from a country they call Brain.

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

We might get out sometime, but she was locked up forever in that body.

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.

What is it about meter and cadence and rhythm that makes their makers mad?

A thought is a hard thing to control.

Reality was getting too dense.

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