Susanna Kaysen

“All my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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?”

“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?”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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 atrest 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 tothen. The very arrangement of molecules is fluid: Tables can be clocks, faces,flowers.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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”

“Who had the courage to burn herself? 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”

“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”

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

“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”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Something about the goat dancing made me want to cry.”

“Sometimes the only way to stay sane is to go a little crazy.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“Don't separate the mind from the body. Don't separate even character - you can't. Our unit of existence is a body, a physical, tangible, sensate entity with perceptions and reactions that express it and form it simultaneously.Disease is 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.”

“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. ”

“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.”

“Confuse was the nurses' word for abuse.”

“Why did she do it? Nobody dared to ask. Because - what courage! Who had the courage to burn herself? 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.What was that moment like for her? The moment she lit the match. Had she already tried roofs and guns and aspirins? Or was it just an inspiration?I had an inspiration once. I woke up one morning and I knew that today I had to swallow fifty aspirin. It was my task: my job for the day. I lined them up on my desk and took them one by one, counting. But it's not the same as what she did. I could have stopped, at ten, or at thirty. And I could have done what I did do, which was go onto the street and faint. Fifty aspirin is a lot of aspirin, but going onto the street and fainting is like putting the gun back in the drawer.She lit the match.”

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

“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.”

“Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?”

“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.”

“With wild eyes that had seen freedom.”

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

“And in the end, I lost him. I did it on purpose, the way Garance lostBaptiste in the crowd. I needed to be alone, I felt. I wanted to be going on alone to my future.”

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

“Viscosity and velocity are opposites, yet they can look the same. Viscosity causes the stillness ofdisinclination, velocity causes the stillness of fascination. An observer can't tell if a person is silent andstill because inner life has stalled or because inner life is transfixingly busy.”

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