Susanna Kaysen Quotes

52 Sourced Quotes

Lunatics are similar to designated hitters. Often an entire family is crazy, but since an entire family can't go into the hospital, one person is designated as crazy and goes inside.

Susanna Kaysen
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.

Susanna Kaysen
Did the hospital specialize in poets and singers, or was it that poets and singers specialized in madness?... What is it about meter and cadence and rhythm that makes their makers mad?

Susanna Kaysen
My family had a lot of characteristics—achievements, ambitions, talents, expectations—that all seemed to be recessive in me.

Susanna Kaysen
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.

Susanna Kaysen
They did not put much value on my capacities, which were admittedly few, but genuine. I read everything, I wrote constantly, and I had boyfriends by the barrelful. Why don't you do the assigned reading? they'd ask. Why don't you write your papers instead of whatever you're writing—what is that, a short story? Why don't you expend as much energy on your schoolwork as you do on your boyfriends? By my senior year I didn't even bother with excuses, let alone explanations. Where is your term paper? asked my history teacher. I didn't write it. I have nothing to say on that topic. You could have picked another topic. I have nothing to say on any historical topic.

Susanna Kaysen
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.

Susanna Kaysen
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. I was demonstrating externally and irrefutably an inward condition.

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

Susanna Kaysen
Is this the type of friend or lover I want to have? I ask myself every time I meet someone new. Charming but shallow; good-hearted but a bit conventional; too handsome for his own good; fascinating but probably unreliable; and so forth. I guess I've had my share of unreliables. More than my share? How many would constitute more than my share?

Susanna Kaysen
Often an entire family is crazy, but since an entire family can't go into the hospital, one person is designated as crazy and goes inside. Then, depending on how the rest of the family is feeling, that person is kept inside or snatched out, to prove something about the family's mental health.

Susanna Kaysen
Jerry was willowy and worried. He had one good trick. Now and then, someone with a lot of privileges was allowed to leave the hospital in a taxi. That person would say, Jerry, call me a cab. Jerry would say, You're a cab. We loved this.

Susanna Kaysen
As far as I could see, life demanded skills I didn't have.

Susanna Kaysen
When she'd been with us a month or so, Lisa Cody got a diagnosis. She was a sociopath too. She was happy, because she wanted to be like Lisa in all things. Lisa was not so happy, because she had been the only sociopath among us. We are very rare, she told me once, and mostly we are men.

Susanna Kaysen
But when they were done, I wondered if there would be a next time. I felt good. I wasn't dead, yet something was dead. Perhaps I'd managed my peculiar objective of partial suicide. I was lighter, airier than I'd been in years.

Susanna Kaysen
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 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. I still think about it. I'll always have to think about it.

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

Susanna Kaysen
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.

Susanna Kaysen
It's one of the reasons I became a writer, to be able to smoke in peace.

Susanna Kaysen
In the parallel universe the laws of physics are suspended. What goes up does not necessarily come down, a body at rest does not tend to stay at rest and not every action can be counted on to provoke an equal and opposite reaction. Time, 'too, is different. It may run in circles, flow backward, skip about from now to then. The very arrangement of molecules is fluid: Tables can be clocks, faces, flowers.

Susanna Kaysen
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.

Susanna Kaysen
It was my misfortune-or salvation-to be at all times perfectly conscious of my misperceptions of reality.

Susanna Kaysen
And this was the main precondition, that anything might be something else. Once I'd accepted that, it followed that I might be mad, or that someone might think me mad. 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?

Susanna Kaysen
Which is worse, overload or underload? Luckily, I never had to choose. One or Pass on to where? Back into my cells to lurk like a virus waiting for the next opportunity? Out into the ether of the world to wait for the circumstances that would provoke its reappearance? Endogenous or exogenous, nature or nurture - it's the great mystery of mental illness.

Susanna Kaysen
Insanity comes in two basic varieties: slow and fast. I'm not talking about onset or duration. I mean the quality of the insanity, the day-to-day business of being nuts.

Susanna Kaysen
This clarity made me able to behave normally, which posed some interesting questions. 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? These questions had me unsettled.

Susanna Kaysen
Most of us saw our therapists every day. Cynthia didn't; she had therapy twice a week and shock therapy once a week. And Lisa didn't go to therapy. She had a therapist, but he used her hour to take a nap. If she was extremely bored, she'd demand to be taken to his office, where she'd find him snoozing in his chair. Gotcha! she'd say. Then she'd come back to the ward. The rest of us traipsed off day after day to exhume the past.

Susanna Kaysen
For many of us, the hospital was as much a refuge as it was a prison. Though we were cut off from the world and all the trouble we enjoyed stirring up out there, we were also cut off from the demands and expectations that had driven us crazy. What could be expected of us now that we were stowed away in a loony bin?

Susanna Kaysen
I was that one who wore black and—really, I've heard it from several people—slept with the English teacher.

Susanna Kaysen
One of my teachers told me I was a nihilist. He meant it as an insult but I took it as a compliment.

Susanna Kaysen