“The only way to stay sane is to go a little crazy.”
Source: Girl, Interrupted
Susanna Kaysen est une écrivaine américaine. C'est la fille de l'économiste Carl Kaysen, un professeur au MIT et ancien conseiller du Président John F. Kennedy, et d'Annette Neutra, sœur de l'architecte Richard Neutra.
En avril 1967, Susanna Kaysen, 18 ans, est entrée volontairement à l'institut psychiatrique Claymore après avoir fait une surdose d'aspirine. Là, on lui a diagnostiqué un trouble de la personnalité borderline.
En 1993, est publié son livre autobiographique "Une vie volée", dans lequel elle décrit sa vie quotidienne dans l'hôpital psychiatrique et celle de ses pensionnaires. Son livre a été adapté en film, Une vie volée, réalisé par James Mangold en 1999, qui est centré sur sa vie et sur son trouble.
Portail de la littérature américaine
Wikipedia
“The only way to stay sane is to go a little crazy.”
Source: Girl, Interrupted
“The world didn't stop because we weren't in it anymore.”
Source: Girl, Interrupted
“Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone.”
Source: Girl, Interrupted
“I told her once I wasn’t good at anything. She told me survival is a talent.”
Source: Girl, Interrupted
“The price of several of those college educations I didn’t want was spent on my hospitalization.”
Girl, Interrupted (1994)
Contexte: 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.
Girl, Interrupted (1994)
Contexte: “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
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)
Contexte: 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)
Contexte: 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?”
Source: Girl, Interrupted
“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)
“With wild eyes that had seen freedom.”
Source: Girl, Interrupted
“Every window in Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.”
Source: Girl, Interrupted
“There is thought, and then there is thinking about thoughts, and they don't feel the same.”
Source: Girl, Interrupted