Susanna Kaysen - Write Quotes

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It's important to cultivate detachment. One way to do this is to practice imagining yourself dead, or in the process of dying. If there's a window, you must imagine your body falling out the window. If there's a knife, you must imagine the knife piercing your skin. If there's a train coming, you must imagine your torso flattened under its wheels. These exercises are necessary to achieving the proper distance. The motive is paramount. Without a strong motive, you're sunk. My motives were weak: an American-history paper I didn't want to write and the question I'd asked months earlier, Why not kill myself? Dead, I wouldn't have to write the paper. Nor would I have to keep debating the question.

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
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