Quotes from Susanna Kaysen

In a strange way we were free. We'd reached the end of the line. We had nothing more to lose.

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. Pull yourself together! I told myself. Stop indulging yourself. There's nothing wrong with you. You're just wayward.

The debate was wearing me out. Once you've posed that question, it won't go away. I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't. Anything I thought or did was immediately drawn into the debate. Made a stupid remark--why not kill myself? Missed the bus--better put an end to it all. Even the good got in there. I liked that movie--maybe I shouldn't kill myself.

I got better and Daisy didn't and I can't explain why. Maybe I was just flirting with madness the way I flirted with my teachers and my classmates. I wasn't convinced I was crazy, though I feared I was. Some people say that having any conscious opinion on the matter is a mark of sanity, but I'm not sure that's true.

Emptiness and boredom: what a complete understatement. What I felt was complete desolation. Desolation, despair and boredom.

Or maybe I was just a girl, interrupted

Maybe I was just flirting with madness the way I flirted with my teachers and my classmates.

There is thought, and then there is thinking about thoughts, and they don't feel the same. They must reflect quite different aspects of brain function. The point is, the brain talks to itself, and by talking to itself changes its perceptions.

Insanity comes in two basic varieties: slow and fast... Viscosity and Velocity are opposites, yet they can look the same. Viscosity causes the stillness of disinclination; velocity causes the stillness of fascination. An observer can't tell if a person is silent and still because inner life has stalled, or because inner life is transfixingly busy.

I am not a nurse escorting six lunatics to the ice cream parlor.

I would if somebody would want to but of course nobody would want to so I wouldn't want to force anybody to want to.

Was everybody seeing this stuff and acting as though they weren't? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act? If some people didn't see these things, what was the matter with them? Were they blind or something?

Freedom was the price of privacy.

Reality was getting too dense.

I'm Ambivalent. In fact that's my new favorite word. Do you know what it means ? I don't care.

Made a stupid remark—why not kill myself? Missed the bus—better put an end to it all. Even the good got in there. I liked that movie—maybe I shouldn't kill myself.

Sana di mente in un mondo di pazzi.

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.

Nothing, I said. It's quiet. It's like? I don't know. It's like falling off a cliff. I laughed. I guess my life will just stop when I get married. It didn't. It wasn't quiet either. 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 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 ("counteract feelings of 'numbness' Ã¢â'¬Â). I was demonstrating, externally and irrefutably, an inward condition.

imagined my character as a plate or shirt that had been manufactured incorrectly and was therefore useless.

Interrupted at her music: as my life had been, interrupted in the music of being seventeen, as her life had been, snatched and fixed on canvas: one moment made to stand still and to stand for all the other moments, whatever they would be or might have been. What life can recover from that? I

I wanted to get rid of a certain aspect of my character. I was performing a kind of self-abortion with those aspirin. It worked for a while. Then it stopped; but I had no heart to try again.

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 slipcover. It shields and disguises what's beneath. That's why we grow it; we have something to hide.