Susanna Kaysen - Day Quotes

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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
It was a spring day, the sort that gives people hope: all soft winds and delicate smells of warm earth. Suicide weather.

Susanna Kaysen
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.

Susanna Kaysen
Later that day, when Alice was off having a Rorschach, I asked, How can a person who's never eaten honey have a family that can afford to send her here? Probably really incredibly crazy and interesting, so they let her in for less, said Georgina.

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