Susanna Kaysen - Person 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
My classmates were spinning their fantasies for the future: lawyer, ethnobotanist, Buddhist monk (it was a very progressive high school). Even the dumb, uninteresting ones who were there to provide balance looked forward to their marriages and their children. I knew I wasn't going to have any of this because I knew I didn't want it. But did that mean I would have nothing? I was the first person in the history of the school not to go to college.

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
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.

Susanna Kaysen
Don't separate the mind from the body. Don't separate even character - you can't. Our unit of existence is a body, a physical, tangible, sensate entity with perceptions and reactions that express it and form it simultaneously. Disease is one of our languages. Doctors understand what disease has to say about itself. It's up to the person with the disease to understand what the disease has to say to her.

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
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