Susanna Kaysen Short Quotes

17 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Susanna Kaysen
When you're sad you need to hear your sorrow structured into sound.

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

Susanna Kaysen
There is thought, and then there is thinking about thoughts, and they don't feel the same.

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

Susanna Kaysen
My self-image was not unstable. I saw myself, quite correctly, as unfit for the educational and social systems.

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

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

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
Quite often social contrariness and a generally pessimistic outlook are observed. Alternation between dependency and self-assertion is common.

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
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
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