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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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Susanna Kaysen
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: November 11
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Cambridge
Massachusetts
Talent
Ambitions
Family
Achievements
Talents
Characteristics
Seemed
Achievement
Expectations
Ambition
Recessive

More quotes by Susanna Kaysen

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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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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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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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I told her once I wasn’t good at anything. She told me survival is a talent.
Susanna Kaysen
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And this was the main precondition, that anything might be something else. Once I'd accepted that, it followed that I might be mad, or that someone might think me mad. How could I say for certain that I wasn't, if I couldn't say for certain that a curtain wasn't a mountain range?
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When you’re sad you need to hear your sorrow structured into sound.
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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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I am not a nurse escorting six lunatics to the ice cream parlor.
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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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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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With wild eyes that had seen freedom.
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Mental illness seems to be a communication problem between interpreters one and two.
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What is it about meter and cadence and rhythm that makes their makers mad?
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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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A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind.
Susanna Kaysen
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Something about the goat dancing made me want to cry.
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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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
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Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone.
Susanna Kaysen