Quotes from Susanna Kaysen

She wasn't blotto, she was plotting.

We might get out sometime, but she was locked up forever in that body.

Our hospital was famous and had housed many great poets and singers. Did the hospital specialize in poets and singers, or was it that poets and singers specialized in madness?

That's because the analysts are writing about a country they call Mind and the neuroscientists are reporting from a country they call Brain.

Crazy isn't being broken, or swallowing a dark secret. It's just you or me, amplified.

They didn't have time to wonder why I was a little more miserable than most.

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.

most of all, we wish that everyone we knew could be brightened simply by our looking at them...

It never stopped, even at night, it was our lullaby. It was our metronome, our pulse. It was our lives measured out in doses slightly larger than those famous coffee spoons. Soup spoons, maybe? Dented tin spoons brimming with what should have been sweet but was sour, gone off, gone by without our savouring it: our lives

She rushed out, because the darkness in the theater was too much when combined with the darkness in her head .

Translation: I need to know the particulars of craziness so I can assure myself that I'm not crazy.

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.

You could also request to be locked into the seclusion room. Not many people made that request. You had to request to get out too. A nurse would look through the chicken wire and decide if you were ready to come out. Somewhat like looking at a cake through the glass of the oven door.

Vittima dell'intolleranza sociale verso comportamenti devianti.

How the fuck else am I going to get any attention in this place? Lisa always called the hospital 'this place.

When digital watches were invented years later they reminded me of five-minute checks. They murdered time in the same way -slowly- chopping off pieces of it and lobbing them into the dustbin with a little click to let you know time was gone. Click, swish, Checks, swish, click: another five minutes of life down the drain. And spent in this place.

It's a mean world," she'd say. She was usually glad enough to be back. "There's nobody to take care of you out there.

Insanity comes in two basic varieties: slow and fast.

The meat was bruised, bleeding, and imprisoned in a tight wrapping. And, though I had a six-month respite from thinking about it, so was I.

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. This was the way I felt about the tunnels. They weren't news to anybody else, but they made such an impression on me that I felt I'd conjured them into being.

Asa had a sharp understanding of the future--that is, a time when this would be past. Time was rushing through and around him, he almost heard it whistling, and this awareness rounded the world somehow and made it sweet.

I had a character disorder. When I got my diagnosis it didn't sound serious, but after a while it sounded more ominous than other people's. I imagined my character as a plate or shirt that had been manufactured incorrectly and was therefore useless.

Quando sei triste hai bisogno di sentire il tuo dolore fatto musica

I can't come up with reassuring answers to the terrible questions they raise. Don't ask me those questions! Don't ask me what life means or how nothing feels real, how everything is coated with gelatin and shining like oil in the sun.