Susanna Kaysen Quotes (65 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

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.

“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 book Girl, Interrupted

Source: Girl, Interrupted

“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 book Girl, Interrupted

Source: Girl, Interrupted

Susanna Kaysen Quotes

“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.”

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

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.”

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

Source: Girl, Interrupted

““A writer,” I said, when my social worker asked me what I planned to do when I got out of the hospital. “I’m going to be a writer.” “That’s a nice hobby, but how are you going to earn a living?” My social worker and I did not like each other. I didn’t like her because she didn’t understand that this was me, and I was going to be a writer; I was not going to type term bills or sell au gratin bowls or do any other stupid things.”

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

Girl, Interrupted (1994)

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

Susanna Kaysen

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.”

Susanna Kaysen

Source: Girl, Interrupted (v českém překladu Narušení)

“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.”

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

Source: Girl, Interrupted

“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.”

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

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.

“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.”

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

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.

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

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

Source: Girl, Interrupted

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

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

Source: Girl, Interrupted

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

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

Source: Girl, Interrupted (1994)

“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.”

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

Source: Girl, Interrupted

“With wild eyes that had seen freedom.”

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

Source: Girl, Interrupted

“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

“Every window in Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.”

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

Source: Girl, Interrupted

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

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

Source: Girl, Interrupted

“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.”

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

Source: 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.”

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

Source: Girl, Interrupted

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

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

Source: Girl, Interrupted

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

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 book Girl, Interrupted

Source: Girl, Interrupted (1994)

“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 book Girl, Interrupted

Source: Girl, Interrupted

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

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

Source: Girl, Interrupted

“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 book Girl, Interrupted

Source: Girl, Interrupted

“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

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

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

Source: Girl, Interrupted

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

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

Source: Girl, Interrupted

“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 book Girl, Interrupted

Source: 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”

Susanna Kaysen book 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.

“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 book Girl, Interrupted

Source: Girl, Interrupted

“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 book Girl, Interrupted

Source: Girl, Interrupted

“Every few months Torrey’s parents flew from Mexico to Boston to harangue her. She was crazy, she had driven them crazy, she was malingering, they couldn’t afford it, and so forth. After they left Torrey would give a report in her tired drawl. “Then Mom said, ‘You made me into an alcoholic,’ and then Dad said, ‘I’m going to see you never get out of this place,’ and then they sort of switched and Mom said, ‘You’re nothing but a junkie,’ and Dad said, ‘I’m not going to pay for you to take it easy in here while we suffer.’ ” “Why do you see them?” Georgina asked. “Oh,” said Torrey. “It’s how they show their love,” said Lisa. Her parents never made contact with her. The nurses agreed with Lisa. They told Torrey she was mature for agreeing to see her parents when she knew they were going to confuse her. Confuse was the nurses’ word for abuse.”

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

Girl, Interrupted (1994)

“My self-image was not unstable. I saw myself, quite correctly, as unfit for the educational and social systems.”

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

Girl, Interrupted (1994)