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Every window in Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.

Susanna Kaysen

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Susanna Kaysen
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: November 11
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Cambridge
Massachusetts
Every
Alcatraz
Francisco
Interrupted
Window
View
Views

More quotes by Susanna Kaysen

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Scar tissue has no character. It's not like skin. It doesn't show age or illness or pallor or tan. It has no pores, no hair, no wrinkles. It's like a slip cover. It shields and disguises what's beneath. That's why we grow it we have something to hide.
Susanna Kaysen
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All my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.
Susanna Kaysen
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I am not a nurse escorting six lunatics to the ice cream parlor.
Susanna Kaysen
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It was my misfortune-or salvation-to be at all times perfectly conscious of my misperceptions of reality.
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Mental illness seems to be a communication problem between interpreters one and two.
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My chronic feelings of emptiness and boredom came from the fact that I was living a life based on my incapacities, which were numerous.
Susanna Kaysen
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With wild eyes that had seen freedom.
Susanna Kaysen
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Have you ever confused a dream with life? Or stolen something when you have the cash? Have you ever been blue? Or thought your train moving while sitting still? Maybe I was just crazy. Maybe it was the 60's. Or maybe I was just a girl... interrupted.
Susanna Kaysen
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As far as I could see, life demanded skills I didn't have.
Susanna Kaysen
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What is it about meter and cadence and rhythm that makes their makers mad?
Susanna Kaysen
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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. 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
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My family had a lot of characteristics - achievements, ambitions, talents, expectations - that all seemed to be recessive in me.
Susanna Kaysen
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I noticed that some of my deadness was being replaced by an intense feeling about the Greek stories and the Bible stories. They were similar. There was something naked about these stories. Terrible things happened, and then some more terrible things.
Susanna Kaysen
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I know what it's like to want to die. How it hurts to smile. How you try to fit in but you can't. You hurt yourself on the outside to try to kill the thing on the inside.
Susanna Kaysen
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Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?
Susanna Kaysen
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There is thought, and then there is thinking about thoughts, and they don't feel the same.
Susanna Kaysen
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I'm your mind, it claims. You can't parse ME into dendrites and synapses
Susanna Kaysen
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When you’re sad you need to hear your sorrow structured into sound.
Susanna Kaysen
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You have to have a somewhat cold heart to be a writer.
Susanna Kaysen
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Not everything has a happy ending, and not everything has an ending. Some things just kind of dribble away or cut off abruptly.
Susanna Kaysen