Quote

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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Susanna Kaysen
Age: 75
Born: 1948
Born: November 11
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Cambridge
Massachusetts
Like
Hair
Disguise
Tissue
Grows
Beneath
Tissues
Age
Cover
Shields
Show
Hide
Interrupted
Doesn
Illness
Wrinkles
Shows
Skin
Slip
Pallor
Character
Skins
Slips
Pores
Something
Grow
Scar
Disguises

More quotes by Susanna Kaysen

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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.
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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Maybe I was just flirting with madness the way I flirted with my teachers and my classmates.
Susanna Kaysen
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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.
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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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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Every window in Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.
Susanna Kaysen
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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.
Susanna Kaysen
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I told her once I wasn’t good at anything. She told me survival is a talent.
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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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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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.
Susanna Kaysen
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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
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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.
Susanna Kaysen
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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.
Susanna Kaysen
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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
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It's a long way from not having enough serotonin to thinking the world is stale, flat and unprofitable even further to writing a play about a man driven by that thought.
Susanna Kaysen
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But when they were done, I wondered if there would be a next time. I felt good. I wasn’t dead, yet something was dead. Perhaps I’d managed my peculiar objective of partial suicide. I was lighter, airier than I’d been in years.
Susanna Kaysen
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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