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Girl, Interrupted
Susanna Kaysen
Susanna Kaysen:
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Famous Susanna Kaysen Quotes
Source: Girl, Interrupted (1994)
“I told her once I wasn’t good at anything. She told me survival is a talent.”
Source: Girl, Interrupted
Source: Girl, Interrupted (1994)
Susanna Kaysen Quotes about people
Variant: I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't.
Source: Girl, Interrupted
Source: Girl, Interrupted (1994)
Girl, Interrupted (1994)
Susanna Kaysen Quotes about thinking
“There is thought, and then there is thinking about thoughts, and they don't feel the same.”
Source: Girl, Interrupted
Girl, Interrupted (1994)
Girl, Interrupted (1994)
Susanna Kaysen: Trending quotes
“The price of several of those college educations I didn’t want was spent on my hospitalization.”
Girl, Interrupted (1994)
Context: Naked, we needed protection, and the hospital protected us. Of course, the hospital had stripped us naked in the first place—but that just underscored its obligation to shelter us. And the hospital fulfilled its obligation. Somebody in our families had to pay a good deal of money for that: sixty dollars (1967 dollars) a day just for the room; therapy, drugs, and consultations were extra. Ninety days was the usual length of mental-hospital insurance coverage, but ninety days was barely enough to get started on a visit to McLean. My workup alone took ninety days. The price of several of those college educations I didn’t want was spent on my hospitalization.
Source: Girl, Interrupted
Susanna Kaysen Quotes
Girl, Interrupted (1994)
Context: “The person often experiences this instability of self-image as chronic feelings of emptiness or boredom.” My chronic feelings of emptiness and boredom came from the fact that I was living a life based on my incapacities, which were numerous. A partial list follows. I could not and did not want to: ski, play tennis, or go to gym class; attend to any subject in school other than English and biology; write papers on any assigned topics (I wrote poems instead of papers for English; I got F’s); plan to go or apply to college; give any reasonable explanation for these refusals.
“It's one of the reasons I became a writer, to be able to smoke in peace.”
Source: Girl, Interrupted
Girl, Interrupted (1994)
Susan Cheever, "A Designated Crazy," The New York Times Book Review, June 20, 1993. (Reviewing Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted.)
On Girl, Interrupted
“I told her once I wasn’t good at anything. She told me survival is a talent.”
Source: Girl, Interrupted (v českém překladu Narušení)
Girl, Interrupted (1994)
Context: And the college business: My parents wanted me to go, I didn’t want to go, and I didn’t go. I got what I wanted. Those who don’t go to college have to get jobs. I agreed with all this. I told myself all this over and over. I even got a job—my job breaking au gratin dishes. 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.
Girl, Interrupted (1994)
Context: 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 the 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 exercises are necessary to achieving the proper distance. The motive is paramount. Without a strong motive, you’re sunk. My motives were weak: an American-history paper I didn’t want to write and the question I’d asked months earlier, Why not kill myself? Dead, I wouldn’t have to write the paper. Nor would I have to keep debating the question.
“When you’re sad you need to hear your sorrow structured into sound.”
Source: Girl, Interrupted
“As far as I could see, life demanded skills I didn’t have.”
Source: Girl, Interrupted (1994)
Source: Girl, Interrupted
“With wild eyes that had seen freedom.”
Source: Girl, Interrupted
“What is it about meter and cadence and rhythm that makes their makers mad?”
Source: Girl, Interrupted
Source: Girl, Interrupted
Source: Girl, Interrupted (1994)
Context: I've gone back to the Frick since then to look at her and at the two other Vermeers. Vermeers, after all, are hard to come by, and the one in Boston has been stolen. The other two are self-contained paintings. The people in them are looking at each other -- the lady and her maid, the soldier and his sweetheart. Seeing them is peeking at them through a hole in a wall. And the wall is made of light -- that entirely credible yet unreal Vermeer light. Light like this does not exist, but we wish it did. We wish the sun could make us young and beauitful, we wish our clothes could glisten and ripple against our skins, most of all, we wish that everyone we knew could be brightened simply by our looking at them, as are the maid with the letter and the soldier with the hat. The girl at her music sits in another sort of light, the fitful, overcast light of life, by which we see ourselves and others only imperfectly, and seldom.
Girl, Interrupted (1994)
“I have nothing to say on any historical topic.”
Girl, Interrupted (1994)
Girl, Interrupted (1994)
Girl, Interrupted (1994)
Girl, Interrupted (1994)
Girl, Interrupted (1994)
Girl, Interrupted (1994)
Girl, Interrupted (1994)
Girl, Interrupted (1994)
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Girl, Interrupted (1994)
Girl, Interrupted (1994)
