Quotes from Susanna Kaysen

Angst of these dimensions is a luxury item. You need to be well fed, clothed, and housed to have time for this much self pity.

These thoughts have no meaning. They are idiot mantras that exist in a prearranged cycle: I'm no good, I'm the Angel of Death, I'm stupid, I can't do anything. Thinking the first thought triggers the whole circuit. It's like the flu: first a sore throat, then, inevitably, a stuffy nose and a cough. Once, these thoughts must have had a meaning. They must have meant what they said. But repetition has blunted them. They have become background music, a Muzak medley of self-hatred themes.

mental illness seems to be a communication problem between interpreters one and two

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

How could I say for certain that I wasn't, if I couldn't say for certain that a curtain wasn't a mountain range.

And it is easy to slip into a parallel universe. There are so many of them: worlds of the insane, the criminal, the crippled, the dying, perhaps of the dead as well. These worlds exist alongside this world and resemble it, but are not in it.

Their love story unfolded and then folded up again in Cambridge, as I watched and took mental notes and learned nothing, naturally, because the heart is unteachable.

The only way to stay sane is to go a little crazy

I always got irritated when he told me he wasn't a doctor. Technically, he was a doctor. Being a doctor is like being a Jew; you can't get away from it.

My friends have hated Asa, first for monopolizing my mind, then for the endless discussions of him they were subjected to, finally, for making me unhappy.

Asa's smell (the fragrance of a beautiful man) is what I miss the most. […] Like a virus his smell entered me and changed my cells, slowly, over years, until they craved only that smell, which was their oxygen.

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.

My hunger, my thirst, my loneliness and boredom and fear were all weapons aimed at my enemy, the world. They didn't matter a whit to the world, of course, and they tormented me, but I got a gruesome satisfaction from my sufferings.

This was what was wonderful, standing alone in the big, soft night rewriting the past to make myself miss what had never been. Now that it was over, I could turn the past into anything I wanted. I could revise the empty space inside me so that it had a better shape: the outline of a happy childhood.

Then he heard the hum. Vibrating in consonance with one of the tones of the ocean's churning, it slid in and out of perceptibility in the way that the landscape disappeared in the mist. But by stilling his breath and, to some degree, his jumping pulse, Jonathan was able to pick it out, the low continuo in the cantata of sea and wind.

I needed to be alone, I felt. I wanted to be going on alone to my future.

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.

I know what you are, said his look. What were we, that they could know us so quickly and so well?

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

When I was supposed to be awake, I was asleep, when I was supposed to speak, I was silent; when a pleasure offered itself to me, I avoided it.

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.

My hunger, my thirst, my loneliness and boredom and fear were all weapons aimed at my enemy, the world.

Lisa's eyes, once so magnetic, now just look empty.

My father was judgmental and kind of mean, and I'm like that. And he was very perfectionistic, and I'm like that. And he was very hard on himself, and I'm like that.