Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
This behavior may...counteract feelings of'numbness'and depersonalization that aries duriing periods of extreme stress.-153 Girl,Interrupted
Susanna Kaysen
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Susanna Kaysen
Age: 75
Born: 1948
Born: November 11
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Cambridge
Massachusetts
Feelings
Numbness
May
Interrupted
Extreme
Extremes
Stress
Periods
Depersonalization
Behavior
Counteract
Girl
Aries
More quotes by Susanna Kaysen
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?
Susanna Kaysen
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
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
What is it about meter and cadence and rhythm that makes their makers mad?
Susanna Kaysen
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
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
I am not a nurse escorting six lunatics to the ice cream parlor.
Susanna Kaysen
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
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
There is thought, and then there is thinking about thoughts, and they don't feel the same.
Susanna Kaysen
As far as I could see, life demanded skills I didn't have.
Susanna Kaysen
Something about the goat dancing made me want to cry.
Susanna Kaysen
All my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.
Susanna Kaysen
It was a spring day, the sort that gives people hope: all soft winds and delicate smells of warm earth. Suicide weather.
Susanna Kaysen
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
Maybe I was just flirting with madness the way I flirted with my teachers and my classmates.
Susanna Kaysen
My family had a lot of characteristics - achievements, ambitions, talents, expectations - that all seemed to be recessive in me.
Susanna Kaysen
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
Mental illness seems to be a communication problem between interpreters one and two.
Susanna Kaysen
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