Quote

It was a spring day, the sort that gives people hope: all soft winds and delicate smells of warm earth. Suicide weather.

Susanna Kaysen

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Susanna Kaysen
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: November 11
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Cambridge
Massachusetts
Sort
Soft
Hope
Weather
Earth
Suicide
Giving
Smell
People
Warm
Spring
Smells
Wind
Winds
Gives
Delicate

More quotes by Susanna Kaysen

Image
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
Image
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
Image
It was my misfortune-or salvation-to be at all times perfectly conscious of my misperceptions of reality.
Susanna Kaysen
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Something about the goat dancing made me want to cry.
Susanna Kaysen
Image
What is it about meter and cadence and rhythm that makes their makers mad?
Susanna Kaysen
Image
I told her once I wasn’t good at anything. She told me survival is a talent.
Susanna Kaysen
Image
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
Image
A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind.
Susanna Kaysen
Image
As far as I could see, life demanded skills I didn't have.
Susanna Kaysen
Image
This clarity made me able to behave normally, which posed some interesting questions. Was everybody seeing this stuff and acting as though they weren't? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act? If some people didn't see these things, what was the matter with them? Were they blind or something? These questions had me unsettled.
Susanna Kaysen
Image
In a strange way we were free. We'd reached the end of the line. We had nothing more to lose. Our privacy, our liberty, our dignity: all of this was gone and we were stripped down to the bare bones of our selves
Susanna Kaysen
Image
You have to have a somewhat cold heart to be a writer.
Susanna Kaysen
Image
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
Image
My family had a lot of characteristics - achievements, ambitions, talents, expectations - that all seemed to be recessive in me.
Susanna Kaysen
Image
I am not a nurse escorting six lunatics to the ice cream parlor.
Susanna Kaysen
Image
I'm your mind, it claims. You can't parse ME into dendrites and synapses
Susanna Kaysen
Image
Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?
Susanna Kaysen