Quote

Don’t ask me those questions! Don’t ask me what life means or how we know reality or why we have to suffer so much. Don’t talk about how nothing feels real, how everything is coated with gelatin and shining like oil in the sun. I don’t want to hear about the tiger in the corner or the Angel of Death or the phone calls from John the Baptist.

Susanna Kaysen

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Susanna Kaysen
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: November 11
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Cambridge
Massachusetts
Mean
Suffering
John
Corner
Much
Means
Shining
Oil
Life
Death
Angel
Calls
Gelatin
Reality
Questions
Phone
Coated
Like
Everything
Sun
Depression
Baptist
Nothing
Hear
Phones
Baptists
Feels
Asks
Corners
Tiger
Real
Talk
Suffer
Tigers

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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.
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You have to have a somewhat cold heart to be a writer.
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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.
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A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind.
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As far as I could see, life demanded skills I didn't have.
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There is thought, and then there is thinking about thoughts, and they don't feel the same.
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Every window in Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.
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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.
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Maybe I was just flirting with madness the way I flirted with my teachers and my classmates.
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It was a spring day, the sort that gives people hope: all soft winds and delicate smells of warm earth. Suicide weather.
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What is it about meter and cadence and rhythm that makes their makers mad?
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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?
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I had an inspiration once. I woke up one morning and I knew that it was my task to swallow fifty asprin.It was my task:my job for the day.-17 Girl Interrupted
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I told her once I wasn’t good at anything. She told me survival is a talent.
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Mental illness seems to be a communication problem between interpreters one and two.
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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.
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You could also request to be locked into the seclusion room. Not many people made that request. You had to request to get out too. A nurse would look through the chicken wire and decide if you were ready to come out. Somewhat like looking at a cake through the glass of the oven door.
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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.
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Crazy isn't being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It's you or me amplified. If you ever told a lie and enjoyed it. If you ever wished you could be a child forever.
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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.
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