Susanna Kaysen: Trending quotes (page 2)

“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.”

“With wild eyes that had seen freedom.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“Whatever we call it - mind, character, soul - we like to think we possess something that is greater than the sum of our neurons and that animates us.”

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

“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.”

“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”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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. Most people pass over incrementally, making a series of perforations in the membrane between here and there until an opening exists. And who can resist an opening?”