Susanna Kaysen - Hospital Quotes

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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
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
A writer, I said, when my social worker asked me what I planned to do when I got out of the hospital. I'm going to be a writer. That's a nice hobby, but how are you going to earn a living? My social worker and I did not like each other. I didn't like her because she didn't understand that this was me, and I was going to be a writer; I was not going to type term bills or sell au gratin bowls or do any other stupid things.

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
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
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