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
Everything
Sun
Depression
Baptist
Nothing
Hear
Phones
Baptists
Feels
Asks
Corners
Tiger
Real
Talk
Suffer
Tigers
Mean
Suffering
John
Corner
Much
Means
Shining
Oil
Life
Death
Angel
Calls
Gelatin
Like
Reality
Questions
Phone
Coated

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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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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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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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It is easy to slip into a parallel universe. There are so many of them: worlds of the insane, the criminal, the crippled, the dying, perhaps of the dead as well. These worlds exist alongside this world and resemble it, but are not in it.
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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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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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Something about the goat dancing made me want to cry.
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We say that Columbus discovered America and Newton discovered gravity, as though America and gravity weren't there until Columbus and Newton got wind of them.
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When you’re sad you need to hear your sorrow structured into sound.
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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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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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Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone.
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An observer can't tell if a person is silent and still because inner life has stalled or because inner life is transfixingly busy.
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I am not a nurse escorting six lunatics to the ice cream parlor.
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Light like this does not exist, but we wish it did. We wish the sun could make us young and beautiful, we wish our clothes could glisten and ripple against our skins, most of all, we wish that everyone we knew could be brightened simply by our looking at them, as are the maid with the letter and the soldier with the hat.
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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.
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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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You have to have a somewhat cold heart to be a writer.
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This behavior may...counteract feelings of'numbness'and depersonalization that aries duriing periods of extreme stress.-153 Girl,Interrupted
Susanna Kaysen